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And On The Last Day, The Bad Days Become So Difficult To Recall, Because One Way Or Another, She Had Made A Life Here, Just As I Had. The Town Was Paper, But The Memories Were Not. All The Things I’d Done Here, All The Love And Pity And Compassion And Violence And Spite, Kept Welling Up Inside Me.

-John Green

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And On The Last

John Green

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And On The Last Day, The Bad Days Become So Difficult To Recall, Because One Way Or Another, She Had Made A Life Here, Just As I Had. The Town Was Paper, But The Memories Were Not. All The Things I’d Done Here, All The Love And Pity And Compassion And Violence And Spite, Kept Welling Up Inside Me.

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I Don't Know How I Look, But I Know How I Feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.

She Did Not Need To Fold Into Herself And Self-destruct. Those Awful Things Are Survivable, Because We Are As Indestructible As We Believe Ourselves To Be. When Adults Say, "teenagers Think The Hate Invincible," With That Sly, Stupid Smile On Their Faces, They Don't Know How Right They Are. We Need Never Be Hopeless, Because We Can Never Be Irreparably Broken.

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To Be Fair To Monica," I Said, "what You Did To Her Wasn't Very Nice Either." "what'd I Do To Her?" He Asked, Defensive. "you Know, Going Blind And Everything." "but That's Not My Fault," Isaac Said. "i'm Not Saying It Was Your Fault. I'm Saying It Wasn't Nice.

Sunlight Feels Warm And Rough Against Your Skin Like A Kiss On The Cheek From Your Dad.

Ben's Tongue Is Like Sunscreen...it's Good For Your Health And Should Be Applied Liberally.

Sorry," I Said To The Duke. "eh, It's Not Your Fault. It's Carla's Fault. You Were Turning The Wheel. Carla Just Wasn't Listening. I Knew I Shouldn't Have Loved Her. She's Like All The Others, Tobin; As Soon As I Confess My Love, She Abandons Me." I Laughed. "i Never Abandoned You," I Said Patting On Her Back. "yeah, Well, (a.) I Never Confessed My Love To You, And (b.) I'm Not Even Female To You.

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He Lit A Cigarette And Handed It To Me. I Inhaled. Coughed. Wheezed. Gasped For Breath. Coughed Again. Considered Vomiting. Grabbed The Swinging Bench, Head Spinning, And Threw The Cigarette To The Ground And Stomped On It, Convinced My Great Perhaps Did Not Involve Cigarettes.

Interesting Capitalization,' I Said. 'yeah. I'm A Big Believer In Random Capitalization. The Rules Of Capitalization Are So Unfair To Words In The Middle.

I Mean, It’s Stupid To Miss Someone You Didn’t Even Get Along With. But I Don’t Know, It Was Nice, You Know, Having Someone You Could Always Fight With.

Missing Someone

There Were So Many Of Us Who Would Have To Live With Things Done And Things Left Undone That Day. Things That Did Not Go Right, Things That Seemed Okay At The Time Because We Could Not See The Future. If Only We Could See The Endless String Of Consequences That Result From Our Smallest Actions. But We Can't Know Better Until Knowing Better Is Useless.

Colin's Skin Was Alive With The Feeling Of Connection To Everyone In That Car And Everyone Not In It. And He Was Feeling Not-unique In The Very Best Possible Way.

We Look Back To The Most Important Moment In Our History, And That Becomes The Dividing Line Between What We Were And What We Are Now.

And Then We Were Kissing. My Hand Let Go Of The Oxygen Cart And I Reached Up For His Neck, And He Pulled Me Up By My Waist Onto My Tiptoes. As His Parted Lips Met Mine, I Started To Feel Breathless In A New And Fascinating Way. The Space Around Us Evaporated, And For A Weird Moment I Really Liked My Body, This Cancer-ruined Thing I'd Spent Years Dragging Around Suddenly Seemed Worth The Struggle, Worth The Chest Tubes And Picc Lines And The Ceaseless Bodily Betrayal Of The Tumors.

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Colin Did Not Laugh. Instead He Thought, Tampons Have Strings? Why? Of All The Major Human Mysteries - God, The Nature Of The Universe, Etc. - He Knew The Least About Tampons. To Colin, Tampons Were A Little Bit Like Grizzly Bears: He Was Aware Of Their Existence, But He'd Never Seen On In The Wild, And Didn't Really Care To.

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Patients Are Almost Always Preceded By Their Parents, Because No Matter How Fast An Ambulance Can Drive, Terrified Parents Can Drive Faster.

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Miscalculations

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My Responsibility Is To Try To Tell True Stories. To Me A True Story Is Always Hopeful, But Never Simply, Uncomplicatedly Happy.

But You Want To See Shapes; You Want To See Stories, So You Pick Them Out Of The Sky.

I Tore Open The Closet Door And Began Feverishly Sorting Through The Shirts Piled On The Floor In The Vain Hope That Inside That Pile There Might Be Some Wondrously Perfect Shirt Down There, A Nice And Tough But I'm Also A Surprisingly Good Listener With A True And Abiding Passion For Cheers And Those Who Lead Them.

I Have A Great Affection For People Who Are Intellectually Engaged With The World, And Who Don't Treat Everything Superficially. And I Think, When People Talk About Nerdiness, What They're Really Talking About Is Smart People Who Who Are Trying To Think Hard About The World. And I Don't Think That's An Insult, I Think That's A Great Thing.

Those Of Us Who Frequent The Band Room Have Long Suspected That Becca Maintains Her Lovely Figure By Eating Nothing But The Souls Of Kittens And The Dreams Of Impoverished Children.

You Have A Choice In This World, I Believe, About How To Tell Sad Stories, And We Made The Funny Choice.

All Those Paper People Living In Their Paper Houses, Burning The Future To Stay Warm.

You Cannot Invent An Algorithm That Is As Good At Recommending Books As A Good Bookseller, And That's The Secret Weapon Of The Bookstore - Is That No Algorithm Will Ever Understand Readers The Way That Other Readers Can Understand Readers.

No Matter How Hard You Kick, No Matter How High You Get, You Can't Go All The Way Around.

I Always Liked Routine. I Suppose I Never Found Boredom Very Boring. I Doubted I Could Explain It To Someone Like Margo But Drawing Circles Through Life Struck Me As A Kind Of Reasonable Insanity.

Peter Van Houten Was The Only Person I’d Ever Come Across Who Seemed To (a) Understand What It’s Like To Be Dying, And (b) Not Have Died.

She Loved Mysteries So Much That She Became One.

And So Much Depends, I Told Augustus, Upon A Blue Sky Cut Open By The Branches Of The Trees Above. So Much Depends Upon The Transparent G-tube Erupting From The Gut Of The Blue-lipped Boy. So Much Depends Upon The Observer Of The Universe.

Something About Me Has Always Liked The Drama And Inconvience Of Bad Weather. The Worse The Better, Really.

My Regret Was Immediate And Permanent And Useless.

Tonight, Darling, We Are Going To Right A Lot Of Wrongs. And We Are Going To Wrong Some Rights. The First Shall Be Last; The Last Shall Be First; The Meek Shall Do Some Earth-inheriting. But Before We Can Radically Reshape The World, We Need To Shop.

In The End, What You Do Isn't Going To Be Nearly As Interesting Or Important As Who You Do It With.

And Then The Line Was Quite But Not Dead. I Almost Felt Like He Was There In My Room With Me, But In A Way It Was Better, Like I Was Not In My Room And He Was Not In His, But Instead We Were Together In Some Invisible And Tenuous Third Space That Could Only Be Visited On The Phone.

Everybody Should Have True Love, And It Should Last At Least As Long As Your Life Does.

You Don't Get To Choose If You Get Hurt In This World...but You Do Have Some Say In Who Hurts You. I Like My Choices.

When It Works, Anticipation Is Far More Fulfilling Than Surprise, Because We Are Reminded That A Sunrise Is Precisely As Magnificent As It Is Inevitable.

I Am In The Midst Of A Soliloquy! I Wrote This Out And Memorized It And If You Interrupt Me I Will Completely Screw It Up,' Augustus Interrupted. 'please To Be Eating Your Sandwich And Listening.

My Thoughts Are Stars I Cannot Fathom Into Constellations.

You Say You're Not Special Because The World Doesn't Know About You, But That's An Insult To Me. I Know About You.

We Live In A Universe Devoted To The Creation, And Eradication, Of Awareness. Augustus Waters Did Not Die After A Lengthy Battle With Cancer. He Died After A Lengthy Battle With Human Consciousness, A Victim - As You Will Be - Of The Universe's Need To Make And Unmake All That Is Possible.

In My Opinion, Actual Heroism, Like Actual Love, Is A Messy, Painful, Vulnerable Business—and I Wanted To Try To Reflect That.

Whatever. Great Day. Today. Best Day Of My Life.

I Opened The Door. He Looked Down At My Shirt And Smiled. "funny," He Said. "don't Call My Boobs Funny," I Answered.

I Think When You're 16, If You Have Good Parents, They Generally Just Fade In The Background. I Had Great Parents, And Because They Were Great, I Thought Very Little About Them In High School.

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

The Whole Pleasure Of Being In A State Of Unknowing Is That As Long As You Don’t Know, All Possible Outcomes Feel As If They Are Happening.

Ya Gotta Live Somewhere, But Also You Get To Live Somewhere.

There Is A Part Of Her Greater Than The Sum Of Her Knowable Parts. And That Part Has To Go Somewhere, Because It Cannot Be Destroyed.

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Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

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