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A Small Olive-skinned Creature Who Had Hit Puberty But Never Hit It Very Hard, Ben Had Been My Best Friend Since Fifth Grade, When We Both Finally Owned Up To The Fact That Neither Of Us Was Likely To Attract Anyone Else As A Best Friend.

-John Green

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A Small Olive-skinned Creature

John Green

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A Small Olive-skinned Creature Who Had Hit Puberty But Never Hit It Very Hard, Ben Had Been My Best Friend Since Fifth Grade, When We Both Finally Owned Up To The Fact That Neither Of Us Was Likely To Attract Anyone Else As A Best Friend.

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Shouldn't Letting Go Be Painless If You've Never Learned How To Hold On?

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Witness Also That When We Talk About Literature, We Do So In The Present Tense. When We Speak Of The Dead, We Are Not So Kind.

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I'm In Love With You, And I'm Not In The Business Of Denying Myself The Simple Pleasure Of Saying True Things.

Happy Valentines Day

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Ben Starling, You Better Not Have Bought Your Token Black Friend A Racist Shirt

Maybe 'okay' Will Be Our 'always

But It Was Sure A Privilege To Love Him, Huh?" I Nodded Into His Shirt. "gives You An Idea How I Feel About You," He Said. My Old Man. He Always Knew Just What To Say.

One Of Those Moments He Knew He'd Remember And Look Back On, One Of Those Moments That He'd Try To Capture In The Stories He Told. Nothing Was Happening, Really, But The Moment Was Thick With Mattering.

We Cannot Be Born, And We Cannot Die. Like All Energy, We Can Only Change Shapes And Sizes And Manifestations.

There Was Quite A Lot Of Competitiveness About It, With Everybody Wanting To Beat Not Only Cancer Itself, But Also The Other People In The Room. Like, I Realize That This Is Irrational, But When They Tell You That You Have, Say, A 20 Percent Chance Of Living Five Years, The Math Kicks In And You Figure That’s One In Five . . . So You Look Around And Think, As Any Healthy Person Would: I Gotta Outlast Four Of These Bastards.

It Is So Hard To Leave-until You Leave.

My Thoughts Are Stars I Cannot Fathom Into Constellations.

I Hate The Rich Snots Here With A Fervent Passion I Usually Reserve Only For Dental Work And My Father.

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‎these Little Contradictions Are In All Of Us. They're In Me At Least. And So I Forgot That I Had Been Awake For 30 Hours And Kept Walking, Grateful To Be A Little Boat Full Of Water, Still Floating.

You Were Clearly Not Doing Your Part In The Clover Search, Perv.

Colin Emphatically Pushed The Book Cover Shut When He Finished Reading. "did You Like It?" His Dad Asked. "yup," Colin Said. He Liked All Books, Because He Liked The Mere Act Of Reading, The Magic Of Turning Scratches On A Page Into Words Inside His Head.

I Didn't Know What To Say To Her - I Was Caught In A Love Triangle With One Dead Side.

But We Can't Know Better Until Knowing Better Is Useless.

Maybe We're Grass—our Roots So Interdependent That No One Is Dead As Long As Someone Is Still Alive.

Maybe Some People Need To Believe In A Proper And Omnipotent God To Pray, But I Don't.

Waffles Are Just Awesome Bread.

Tonight, Darling, We Are Going To Right A Lot Of Wrongs.

And Even Though He Felt Pitiful And Ridiculous, He Didn't Want It To End, Because He Knew The Absence Of Her Would Hurt More Than Any Breakup Ever Could.

And The Moral Of The Story Is That You Don't Remember What Happened. What You Remember Becomes What Happened. And The Second Moral Of The Story, If A Story Can Have Multiple Morals, Is That Dumpers Are Not Inherently Worse Than Dumpees - Breaking Up Isn't Something That Gets Done To You; It's Something That Happens With You.

Moral Of The Story

There Are Many More Jobs Out There Than You Have Ever Heard Of. Your Dream Job Might Not Yet Exist. If You Had Told 'college Me' That I Would Become A Professional Youtuber, I Would've Been Like, "that Is Not A Word, And It Never Should Be."

Poetry Is Just So Emo." He Said. "oh, The Pain. The Pain. It Always Rains. In My Soul.

My Stomach Sank. Jp Had Come So Close. His Immigrant Parents Had Sacrificed So Much.

Immigrant Parents

We Have To Live With Ambiguity. We Have To Give Ourselves Over To It. The Question Is: How? How Are We Going To Live In A Universe Where Important Questions Will Always Go Unanswered?

Finally, I Decided That The Proper Strategy Was To Stare Back. Boys Do Not Have A Monopoly On The Staring Business.

You Can't Just Make Yourself Matter And Then Die, Alaska, Because Now I Am Irretrievably Different.

If I'm Too Old To Be Emo, How Do You Account For The Very Emo And Very Old Edgar Allan Poe? Checkmate!

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Peter L. Berger

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