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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.

-John Green

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And So Much Depends,

John Green

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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.

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. . . Endlessness Is A Really Strange Idea In A Universe That Is Defined By Its Endings.

So Often We Try To Make Other People Feel Better By Minimizing Their Pain, By Telling Them That It Will Get Better (which It Will) Or That There Are Worse Things In The World (which There Are). But That's Not What I Actually Needed. What I Actually Needed Was For Someone To Tell Me That It Hurt Because It Mattered. I Have Found This Very Useful To Think About Over The Years, And I Find That It Is A Lot Easier And More Bearable To Be Sad When You Aren't Constantly Berating Yourself For Being Sad.

It Hurt, And That Is Not A Euphemism. It Hurt Like A Beating.

You Used," He Said, And Then Took A Sharp Breath, "to Call Me Augustus.

Neither Novels Or Their Readers Benefit From Any Attempts To Divine Whether Any Facts Hide Inside A Story. Such Efforts Attack The Very Idea That Made-up Stories Can Matter, Which Is Sort Of The Foundational Assumption Of Our Species.

Made Up Stories

In Those Fifty, The Old Man Made Me Take Religion Seriously. I'd Never Been Religious, But He Told Us That Religion Is Important Whether Or Not We Believed In One, The Same Way That Historical Events Are Important Whether Or Not You Personally Lived Through Them.

This Is So Much Fun, But I’m So Sleepy. To Be Continued?

Half-drunk On Well-creamed Gas Station Coffee And The Exhilarating Loneliness Of A Freeway In Nighttime.

There Is Always The Risk: Something Is Good And Good And Good And Good, And Then All At Once It Gets Awkward. All At Once, She Sees You Looking At Her, And Then She Doesn't Want To Joke Around With You Anymore, Because She Doesn't Want To Seem Flirty, Because She Doesn't Want You To Think She Likes You. It's Such A Disaster, Whenever, In The Course Of Human Relationships, Someone Begins To Chisel Away At The Wall Of Separation Between Friendship And Kissing.

I Hope We Get Pulled Over, He Says. I'd Like To See How The Cop Responds To A Black Man Wearing A Confederate T-shirt Over A Black Dress.

I May Die Young, But At Least I'll Die Smart.

We Need Never Be Hopeless Because We Can Never Be Irreperably Broken.

Pain Is Like Fabric: The Stronger It Is, The More It’s Worth.

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.

I’m Not Up For Laughing, But Their Laughter Makes The Room Feel Safer, So We Begin To Explore.

You See How Fake It All Is. It's Not Even Hard Enough To Be Made Out Of Plastic. It's A Paper Town.

I Learned That Myth Doesn’t Mean A Lie; It Means A Traditional Story That Tells You Something About People And Their Worldview And What They Hold Sacred. Interesting.

In Our Hyper-secular World, Worship Is Still Inevitable. But It Is Vital To Remember That Our Gods Don't Choose Us, We Choose Them.

Writing Does Not Resurrect. It Buries.

Caroline Is No Longer Sufffering From Personhood.

The Worse The Haircut, The Better The Man.

Augustus, Perhaps You’d Like To Share Your Fears With The Group.” “my Fears?” “yes.” “i Fear Oblivion,” He Said Without A Moment’s Pause. “i Fear It Like The Proverbial Blind Man Who’s Afraid Of The Dark.” “too Soon,” Isaac Said, Cracking A Smile. “was That Insensitive?” Augustus Asked. “i Can Be Pretty Blind To Other People’s Feelings.

We're All Just Facilitators. The Real Business Is Done By Readers.

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

And I Will Forget Her, Yes. That Which Came Together Will Fall Apart Slowly, But She Will Forgive My Forgetting, Just As I Forgive Her For Forgetting Me And The Colonel And Nothing But Herself And Her Mom In Those Last Moments As She Spent As A Person.

I Could Stand Up And Go To Her And Kiss Her. I Could. But There Is Still Too Much To Be Ruined.

I Like To Know The Places I Write About. I Feel Like It Helps Me Ground The Novel. My Novels Are 'realistic Novels,' But They Can Also Be Fantastical, So It's Nice To Have A Setting That Grounds Them A Little Bit.

Oh, Wikipedia, With Your Tension Between Those Who Would Share Knowledge And Those Who Would Destroy It.

Sharing Knowledge

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.

What's That?" "the Laundry Basket?" "no, Next To It." "i Don't See Anything Next To It." "it's My Last Shred Of Dignity. It's Very Small.

Whenever You Read A Cancer Booklet Or Website Or Whatever, They Always List Depression Among The Side Effects Of Cancer. But, In Fact, Depression Is Not A Side Effect Of Cancer. Depression Is A Side Effect Of Dying.

A Desert Blessing, An Ocean Curse.

What I Love About The Sculpture Is That It Makes The Bones That We Are Always Walking And Playing On Manifest, Like In A World That So Often Denies The Reality Of Death And The Reality That We Are Surrounded By And Outnumbered By The Dead. Here, Is A Very Playful Way Of Acknowledging That And Acknowledging That And That Always, Whenever We Play, Whenever We Live, We Are Living In Both Literal And Metaphorical Ways On The Memory And Bones Of The Dead.

Writing Fiction Is An Inherently Political Activity Because People-even Imaginary Ones-do Not Live In Vacuums... From Twilight To Romeo And Juliet To The Little Mermaid, No Work Of The Imagination Is Truly Apolitical, Because The World And Our Hopes For It Are Always Part Of Our Stories.

And As We Kept Driving North, The Whole Family In The Care Together, It Got Darker, And Snowier, Until Finally The Road Delivered Us To The One Place That All My Youthful Trips West Never Could: Home.

Isn't It Also That On Some Fundamental Level We Find It Difficult To Understand That Other People Are Human Beings In The Same Way That We Are? We Idealize Them As Gods Or Dismiss Them As Animals.

Facts, Even False Ones, Cannot Be Copyrighted.

Much Of My Life Had Been Devoted To Trying Not To Cry In Front Of People Who Loved Me, So I Knew What Augustus Was Doing. You Clench Your Teeth. You Look Up. You Tell Yourself That If They See You Cry, It Will Hurt Them, And You Will Be Nothing But A Sadness In Their Lives, And You Must Not Become A Mere Sadness, So You Will Not Cry, And You Say All Of This To Yourself While Looking Up At The Ceiling, And Then You Swallow Even Though Your Throat Does Not Want To Close And You Look At The Person Who Loves You And Smile.

Just Spend A Few More Months Playing Video Games. That Hand-eye Coordination Will Come In Handy When You Get To Third Base.

Reading It The Night Before, I'd Wondered If It Would Be Like That For Me-if In One Moment, I Would Finally Understand Her, Know Her, And Understand The Role I'd Played In Her Dying. But I Wasn't Convinced Enlightenment Struck Like Lightining.

You Can Say A Lot Of Bad Things About Tiny Cooper. I Know, Because I Have Said Them. But For A Guy Who Knows Absolutely Nothing About How To Conduct His Own Relationships, Tiny Cooper Is Kind Of Brilliant When It Comes To Dealing With Other People's Heartbreak. Tiny Is Like Some Gigantic Sponge Soaking Up The Pain Of Lost Love Everywhere He Goes.

That's Why People Grow Weary Of Listening To Dumpees Obsess Over Their Troubles: Getting Dumped Is Predictable, Repetitive, And Boring. They Want To Stay Friends; They Feel Smothered; It's Always Them And It's Never You; And Afterward, You're Devastated And Their Relieved; It's Over For Them And Just Starting For You.

Everything's Uglier Close Up," She Said. "not You," I Answered.

Reading With An Eye Towards Metaphor Allows Us To Become The Person We’re Reading About, While Reading About Them. That’s Why There Is Symbols In Books And Why Your English Teacher Deserves Your Attention. Ultimately, It Doesn’t Matter If The Author Intended The Symbol To Be There Because The Job Of Reading Is Not To Understand The Author’s Intent. The Job Of Reading Is To Use Stories As A Way Into Seeing Other People As A We Ourselves.

Oh, I Wouldn't Mind, Hazel Grace. It Would Be A Privilege To Have My Heart Broken By You.

High School Made Me Realize That The People Who Say They Will Never Change, Are Always The Ones Who Change The Most.

Observation: It Would Be Awesome To Fly In A Superfast Airplane That Could Chase The Sunrise Around The World For A While.

It Felt Like Everything Was Rising Up In Me, Like I Was Drowning In This Weirdly Painful Joy, But I Couldn't Say It Back. I Just Looked At Him And Let Him Look At Me Until He Nodded, Lips Pursed And Turned Away, Placing The Side Of His Head Against The Window.

Like Everyone, I'm Saddened And Horrified By This. All I'll Say Is That I'm Personally Trying To Pay More Attention To The Victims Than To Their Murderer. I Certainly Will Not Be Mentioning The Murderer. I Don't Think He Warrants Our Attention-particularly Since He So Clearly Wanted It.

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

If I Had A Nervous Breakdown Every Time Something Awful Happened In The World, I'd Be Crazier Than A Shithouse Rat.

What You Must Understand About Me Is That I’m A Deeply Unhappy Person.

3 Whole Catfish, Wrapped Separately Veet (it’s For Shaving Your Legs Only You Don’t Need A Razor. It’s With All The Girly Cosmetic Stuff) Vaseline Six Pack, Mountain Dew One Dozen Tulips One Bottle Of Water Tissues One Can Of Blue Spray Paint

It's Not Life Or Death, The Labyrinth. Suffering. Doing Wrong And Having Wrong Things Happen To You. That's The Problem. Bolivar Was Talking About The Pain, Not About The Living Or Dying. How Do You Get Out Of The Labyrinth Of Suffering?

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

Every Second Of Your Definitionally Temporary Consciousness, You Are Choosing How You Spend Something That Will Not Last Forever.

For She Had Embodied The Great Perhaps--she Had Proved To Me That It Was Worth It To Leave Behind My Minor Life For Grander Maybes, And Now She Was Gone And With Her My Faith In Perhaps.

I Am Still Bowled Over By This Great Young Adult Novel By David Levithan Called 'every Day,' Which Is About A Character With No Gender Or Body Who Wakes Up Every Day In The Body Of A Different Person. It's A Really Impressive Execution Of A Really Great Premise.

You Can't Not Like "the Great Gatsby." It's Got The Best Sentences In, Like, Ever.

The Minister Said, “let Us Pray,” But As Everyone Else Bowed Their Head, I Could Only Stare Slack-jawed At The Sight Of Peter Van Houten. After A Moment, He Whispered, “we Gotta Fake Pray,” And Bowed His Head.

Do You Guys Remember That Time When We Were All Definitely Going To Die And Then Ben Grabbed The Steering Wheel And Dodged A Ginormous Freaking Cow And Spun The Car Like The Teacups At Disney World And We Didn't Die?

She Smiled With All The Delight Of A Kid On Christmas Morning And Said, "y'all Smoke To Enjoy It. I Smoke To Die." - Alaska

I Told Augustus The Broad Outline Of My Miracle: Diagnosed With Stage Iv Thyroid Cancer When I Was Thirteen. (i Didn’t Tell Him That The Diagnosis Came Three Months After I Got My First Period. Like: Congratulations! You’re A Woman. Now Die.)

Congratulations

But When It Came Right Down To It, The Skin Of My Wrist Looked So White And Defensless That I Couldn't Do It. It Was As If What I Wanted To Kill Wasn't In That Skin Or The Thin Blue Pulse That Jumped Under My Thumb, But Somewhere Else, Deeper, More Secret, And A Whole Lot Harder To Get." I Know What She's Talking About. The Something Deeper And More Secret. It's Like Cracks Inside Of You. Like There Are These Fault Lines Where Things Don't Meet Up Right.

But Mothers Lie. It's In The Job Description.

Something Invisible Snapped Inside Her.

As I Recall, You Promised To Call When You Finished The Book, Not Text.

If You Don't Say The Honest Thing, It Never Becomes True.

I'm Not Saying That Everything Is Survivable. Just That Everything Except The Last Thing Is.

Pudge, My Friend, We Are Indefuckingstructible.

It's Fine," I Repeated. And Whatever. It Was Fine. It Had To Be.

My Love, I Cannot Tell You How Thankful I Am For Our Little Infinity, ~ Hazel Lancaster.

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.

We Did A Few Things Worth Remembering, And I Wish For Someone To Remember Them.

She Had The Kind Of Fingers You Want To Interlace With Your Own.

But Monotony Doesn't Make For Painlessness.

In The Contemporary World Where Things Fall Apart, And The Centre Cannot Hold, You Have To Imagine A Community Where There Is No Centre. Hank, At The End Of This Year I Started Thinking That A Lot Of Life Is About Doing Things That Don’t Suck With People Who Don’t Suck.

It's Bad For Your Brain Not To Unplug.

You Could Drive Past It Without Noticing And From What I Understand, You Ought To.

And So That Is The Question I Leave You With In This Final: What Is Your Cause For Hope?

Everlasting Life

Some Wars," He Said Dismissively. "what Am I At War With? My Cancer. And What Is My Cancer? My Cancer Is Me. The Tumors Are Made Of Me. They're Made Of Me As Surely As My Brain And My Heart Is Made Of Me. It Is A Civil War, Hazel Grace, With A Predetermined Winner.

It Is The Nature Of Stars To Cross

She Never Acted As If She Liked Him All That Much, But Then She Never Acted As If She Liked Anyone All That Much.

Imagine Others Complexly.

When It Comes To Girls (and In Colin's Case, It So Often Did), Everyone Has A Type. Colin Singleton's Type Was Not Physical But Linguistic: He Liked Katherines. And Not Katies Or Kats Or Kitties Or Cathys Or Rynns Or Trinas Or Kays Or Kates Or, God Forbid, Catherines. K-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e. He Had Dated 19 Girls. All Of Them Had Been Named Katherine. And All Of Them- Every Single Solitary One- Had Dumped Him.

Imagining Isn't Perfect. You Can't Get All The Way Inside Someone Else...but Imagining Being Someone Else, Or The World Being Something Else, Is The Only Way In. It Is The Machine That Kills Fascists.

Nothing Really Mattered That Much, Not The Good Things And Not The Bad Ones. We Were In The Business Of Mutual Amusement, And We Were Reasonably Prosperous.

Augustus Waters," I Said, Looking Up At Him, Thinking That You Cannot Kiss Anyone In The Anne Frank House, And Then Thinking That Anne Frank, After All, Kissed Someone In The Anne Frank House, And That She Would Probably Like Nothing More Than For Her Home To Have Become A Place Where The Young And Irreparably Broken Sink Into Love.

When We Read The Right Book Generously, It Can Change The Way Think About The World Around Us.

They Belong To Their Readers Now, Which Is A Great Thing–because The Books Are More Powerful In The Hands Of My Readers Than They Could Ever Be In My Hands.

Even If It’s A Dumb Story, Telling It Changes People Just The Slightest Little Bit, Just As Living The Story Changes Me. An Infinitesimal Change. And That Infinetisimal Change Ripples Outward —ever Smaller But Everlasting. I Will Get Forgotten, But The Stories Will Last. And So We All Matter —maybe Less Than A Lot, But Always More Than None.

To Be Human Is To Catch The Falling Person.

How About I Call You When I Finish This?” “but You Don’t Even Have My Phone Number,” He Said. “i Strongly Suspect You Wrote It In The Book.” He Broke Out Into That Goofy Smile. “a Nd You Say We Don’t Know Each Other.

In These Pages, And In My Memories, She Reminds Me That A Short Life Can Also Be A Good And Rich Life, That It Is Possible To Live With Depression Without Being Consumed By It, And That Meaning In Life Is Found Together, In Family And Friendship That Transcends And Survives All Manner Of Suffering. As The Poet Wrote In The Bible's Song Of Solomon, 'love Is Strong As Death.' Or Perhaps Even Stronger.

Of Course I Tensed Up When He Touched Me. To Be With Him Was To Hurt Him-inevitably. And That's What I'd Felt As He Reached For Me: I'd Felt As Though I Were Committing An Act Of Violence Against Him, Because I Was.

Moms Aren’t The Best Audience For Medication Humor.

Indiana,’ He Said. ‘they Steal The Land From The Indians And Leave The Name, Yes?

There Were Five Others Before They Got To Him. He Smiled A Little When His Turn Came. His Voice Was Low, Smoky, And Dead Sexy. “my Name Is Augustus Waters,” He Said. “i’m Seventeen. I Had A Little Touch Of Osteosarcoma A Year And A Half Ago, But I’m Just Here Today At Isaac’s Request.” “and How Are You Feeling?” Asked Patrick. “oh, I’m Grand.” Augustus Waters Smiled With A Corner Of His Mouth. “i’m On A Roller Coaster That Only Goes Up, My Friend.

It's Not Fair," I Said. "it's Just So Goddamned Unfair." "the World," He Said, "is Not A Wishgranting Factory.

And I Wrote My Way Out Of The Labyrinth.

Truth Defies Simplicity.

There Is No Try. There Is Only Do.

If He Is Anything Other Than A Total Gentleman, I’m Going To Gouge His Eyes Out.” “so You’re Into It.” “withholding Judgment! When Can I See You?” “certainly Not Until You Finish An Imperial Affliction.” I Enjoyed Being Coy. “then I’d Better Hang Up And Start Reading.” “you’d Better,” I Said, And The Line Clicked Dead Without Another Word. Flirting Was New To Me, But I Liked It.

The World Went On, As It Does, Without My Full Participation, And I Only Woke Up From The Reverie When Someone Said My Name.

There's A Place In The Brain For Knowing What Cannot Be Remembered.

She Would Stay On The Road And In Hiding, A Balloon Floating Through The Sky, Eating Up Hundreds Of Miles A Day With A Help Of The Perpetual Tailwind.

God Will Punish The Wicked. And Before He Does, We Will.

I Wanted To Be One Of Those People Who Have Streaks To Maintain, Who Scorch The Ground With Their Intensity. But For Now, At Least I Knew Such People, And They Needed Me, Just Like Comets Need Tails.

You Listen To People So That You Can Imagine Them, And You Hear All The Terrible And Wonderful Things People Do To Themselves And To One Another, But In The End The Listening Exposes You Even More Than It Exposes The People You're Trying To Listen To.

I Wanted So Badly To Lie Down Next To Her On The Couch, To Wrap My Arms Around Her And Sleep... Just Sleep Together, In The Most Innocent Sense Of The Phrase. But I Lacked The Courage And She Had A Boyfriend And I Was Gawky And She Was Gorgeous And I Was Boring And She Was Endlessly Fascinating. So I Walked Back To My Room And Collapsed On The Bottom Bunk, Thinking That If People Were Rain, I Was Drizzle And She Was A Hurricane.

The Times That Were Most Fun Seemed Always To Be Followed By Sadness Now, Because It Was When Life Started To Feel Like It Did When She Was With Us That We Realized How Utterly Gone She Was.

Nerd Girls Are The World’s Most Underutilized Romantic Resource. And Guys, Do Not Tell Me That Nerd Girls Are Not Hot Because That Shows A Paris Hilton-esque Failure To Understand Hotness.

How Can You Read And Talk At The Same Time?” I Asked. “well, I Usually Can’t, But Neither The Book Nor The Conversation Is Particularly Intellectually Challenging.

There Is No Shortage Of Fault To Be Found Amid Our Stars

We All Want To Do Something To Mitigate The Pain Of Loss Or To Turn Grief Into Something Positive, To Find A Silver Lining In The Clouds. But I Believe There Is Real Value In Just Standing There, Being Still, Being Sad.

You Can't Just Make Me Different And Then Leave. You Can't. You Can't Change Me And Make My Whole Life Centered Around You, Then Leave.

And I Wanted To Tell Her That The Pleasure For Me Wasn't Planning Or Doing Or Leaving; The Pleasure Was In Seeing Our Strings Cross And Separate And Then Come Back Together.

It Seemed Like Forever Ago, Like We've Had This Brief But Still Infinite Forever. Some Infinities Are Bigger Than Other Infinities.

...it Sounded Like A Dragon Breathing In Time With Me, Like I Had This Pet Dragon Who Was Cuddled Up Next To Me And Cared Enough About Me To Time His Breaths To Mine.

Keys Show Up When You Reconcile Yourself To The Bus.

What's Your Name ? Hazel . No , Your Full Name . Um , Hazel Grace Lancaster .

We Are Now As I Wished We Could Be Then.

Good Friends Are Hard To Find And Impossible To Forget.

Impossible To Forget

But Even If We Survive The Collapse Of Our Sun, We Will Not Survive Forever.

She Fell Apart Because That's What Happens.

The Sky Is Like A Monochromatic Contemporay Painting, Drawing Me In Its Illusion Of Depth, Pulling Me Up.

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.

You Know How We Make A Scotch And Water In This Home?" "no, Sir," Gus Said. "we Pour Scotch Into A Glass And Then Call To Mind Thoughts Of Water, And Then We Mix The Actual Scotch With The Abstracted Idea Of Water.

They Couldn't Bear The Idea Of Death Being A Big Black Nothing.

I Like The Strings. I Always Have. Because That's How It Feels. But The Strings Make Pain Seem More Fatal Than It Is, I Think. We're Not As Frail As The Strings Would Make Us Believe. And I Like The Grass, Too. The Grass Got Me To You, Helped Me To Imagine You As An Actual Person. But We're Not Different Sprouts From The Same Plant. I Can't Be You. You Can't Be Me. You Can Imagine Another Well – But Never Quite Perfectly, You Know?

I Kept Thinking There Were Two Kinds Of Adults: There Were...miserable Creatures Who Scoured The Earth In Search Of Something To Hurt. And Then There Were People Like My Parents, Who Walked Around Zombically, Doing Whatever They Had To Do To Keep Walking Around.

But It Is The Nature Of Stars To Cross, And Never Was Shakespeare More Wrong Than When He Has Cassius Note, ‘the Fault, Dear Brutus, Is Not In Our Stars / But In Ourselves.

How Will I Ever Get Out Of This Labyrinth!" To A Margin Note Written In Her Loop-heavy Cursive: Straight & Fast.

I Realized It In Waves And We Held On To Each Other Crying And I Thought, God We Must Look So Lame, But It Doesn't Matter Much When You Have Just Now Realized, All The Time Later, That You Are Still Alive.

We Are Engaged Here In The Most Important Pusuit In History. The Search For Meaning. What Is What Is The Nature Of Being A Person? What Is The Best Way To Go About Being A Person?how Did We Come To Be, And Wha Will Become Of Us When We Are No Longer? In Short: What Are The Rules This Game, And How Might We Best Play It?

Not Following Her Is The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done.

Colin Thought About The Dork Mantra: Sticks And Stones May Break My Bones, But Words Will Never Hurt Me. What A Dirty Lie.

You Shall Love Your Neighbour With Your Crooked Heart, It Says So Much About Love And Brokenness -- It's Perfect.

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.

He Let His Mind Wander. It Went To A Predictable Place, And He Missed Her

In The End The Listening Exposes You Even More Than It Exposes The People You're Trying To Listen To.

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.

It Seems To Me That All The Things We Keep In Sealed Boxes Are Both Alive And Dead Until We Open The Box, That The Unobserved Is Both There And Not.

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

Augustus Waters Died Eight Days After His Prefuneral, At Memorial, In The Icu, When The Cancer, Which Was Made Of Him, Finally Stopped His Heart, Which Was Also Made Of Him.

I Knew That I Would Know More Dead People. The Bodies Pile Up. Could There Be A Space In My Memory For Each Of Them, Or Would I Forget A Little Of Alaska Every Day For The Rest Of My Life?

Our Lives Are Composed Of A Finite Set Of Moments That We Choose How To Spend.

Cherish Every Moment

Life Has Become The Future.

Becoming A Father Made Me Much More Interested In The Parent Character In My Novels. I've Never Found Parents That Interesting.

The Internet Is Necessarily Public. It Can Be Filtered-public Or Censored-public, But It Necessarily Has To Be Open And Available.

Sometimes I Don't Get You,' I Said. She Didn't Even Glance At Me. She Just Smiled Toward The Television And Said, 'you Never Get Me. That's The Whole Point.

Nerdfighter Pwns Woot. Everyone Knows That.

Don't Lie To Anyone, But Particularly Don't Lie To Millennials. They Just Know. They Can Smell It. Be Yourself: If You're Old, Be Old. If You Don't Know Anything About Pop Culture, Don't Pretend To Know Anything About Pop Culture. When You Credit Teenagers With Intelligence And Emotional Sophistication, They Respond Intelligently And With Emotional Sophistication.

It's Just That Most Really Good-looking People Are Stupid, So I Exceed Expectations.' 'right, It's Primarily His Hotness,' I Said. 'it Can Be Sort Of Blinding,' He Said. 'it Actually Did Blind Our Friend Isaac,' I Said. 'terrible Tragedy, That. But Can I Help My Own Deadly Beauty?' 'you Cannot.' 'it Is My Burden, This Beautiful Face.' 'not To Mention Your Body.' 'seriously, Don't Even Get Me Started On My Hot Bod. You Don't Want To See Me Naked, Dave. Seeing Me Naked Actually Took Hazel Grace's Breath Away,' He Said, Nodding Toward The Oxygen Tank.

I Don't See A Future Where We're All Taught By Robots. The Real Life, Physical Experience Of Being In A Classroom And Having Conversations With Knowledgeable People Is Immeasurably Valuable And Irreplaceable.

Whatever, Bro. We Both Had A Long Day. Too Much Drama. I'll Ttys." I Wanted To Ridicule Him For Using Chatspeak Irl, But I Found Myself Lacking The Energy.

Because You're Only Thinking They-might-not-like-me-they-might-not-like-me, And Guess What? When You Act Like That, No One Likes You.

The Nature Of The Labyrinth, I Scribbled Into My Spiral Notebook, And The Way Out Of It. This Teacher Rocked. I Hated Discussion Classes. I Hated Talking, And I Hated Listening To Everyone Else Stumble On Their Words And Try To Phrase Things In The Vaguest Possible Way So They Wouldn't Sound Dumb, And I Hated How It Was All Just A Game Of Trying To Figure Out What The Teacher Wanted To Hear And Then Saying It. I'm In Class, So Teach Me.

No Headboards Were Broken.

I Went On Spouting Bullshit Encouragements As Gus's Parents, Arm In Arm, Hugged Each Other And Nodded At Every Word. Funerals, I Had Decided, Are For The Living.

You Spend Your Whole Life Stuck In The Labyrinth.

Imagining The Future

I'm Not Asexual. I'm Arelationshipal.

But I Was Not In The Band, Because I Suffer From The Kind Of Tone Deafness That Is Generally Associated With Actual Deafness

I Didn't Even Know What The Feeling Was, Really, Just That There Was A Lot Of It.

We Left. We Did Not Say: Don't Drive, You're Drunk. We Did Not Say: We Aren't Letting You In That Car When You Are Upset. We Did Not Say: We Insist On Going With You. We Did Not Say: This Can Wait Until Tomorrow. Anything-everything-can Wait.

The Marks Humans Leave Are Too Often Scars.

When We Think Of Death, We Often Imagine It As Happening In Degrees: We Think Of A Sick Person Becoming Less And Less Alive Until Finally They Are Gone.

A Paper Town For A Paper Girl.

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.

It Turns Out That, Somehow, There Are A Tremendous Number Of Things To Be Optimistic About.

There's No Reason Whatsoever To Drink Eight Glasses Of Water A Day Unless You, For Whatever Reason, Particularly Like The Taste Of Water

Do You Know What Your Problem Is? You Can't Live With The Idea That Someone Might Leave.

This Is What I Love About Novels - Both Reading Them And Writing Them. They Jump Into The Abyss To Be With You Where You Are.

I Jog Through The Halls And Then Go Upstairs To Jane’s Locker And Carefully Slip The Note I Wrote Last Night Through The Vent: To: The Locker Houdini From: Will Grayson Re: An Expert In The Field Of Good Boyfriends? Dear Jane, Just So You Know: E. E. Cummings Cheated On Both Of His Wives. With Prostitutes. Yours, Will Grayson

And Then I Screwed Up And The Colonel Screwed Up And Takumi Screwed Up And She Slipped Through Our Fingers.

Labyrinth Looking For Alaska

You Like Someone Who Can't Like You Back Because Unrequited Love Can Be Survived In A Way That Once-requited Love Cannot.

Unrequited Love

Read A Lot. Read Broadly... Tell Stories To Your Friends, And Pay Attention To When They Get Bored... Write A Lot.

Does My Eye Look Okay To You?

Sometimes You Lose A Battle. But Mischief Always Wins The War

She Has Great Breasts," The Colonel Said Without Looking Up From The Whale. "do Not Objectify Women's Bodies!" Alaska Shouted. Now He Looked Up. "sorry. Perky Breasts." "that's Not Any Better!

Anything That Happens All At Once Is Just As Likely To Unhappen All At Once, You Know?

I’ve Stopped Thinking About It. I Don’t Have Time To Have A Girlfriend. I Have Like A Full-time Job Learning How To Be Blind.

Her Underwear, Her Jeans, The Comforter, My Corduroys And My Boxers Between Us, I Thought. Five Layers, And Yet I Felt It, The Nervous Warmth Of Touching – A Pale Reflection Of The Fireworks Of One Mouth On Another, But A Reflection Nonetheless. And In The Almostness Of The Moment, I Cared At Least Enough. I Wasn’t Sure Whether I Liked Her, And Doubted Whether I Could Trust Her, But I Cared At Least Enough To Try To Find Out. Her On My Bed, Wide Green Eyes Staring Down At Me. The Enduring Mystery Of Her Sly, Almost Smirking, Smile. Five Layers Between Us.

It Looked Like An Old Painting, But Real - Everything Achingly Idyllic In The Morning Light - And I Thought About How Wonderfully Strange It Would Be To Live In A Place Where Almost Everything Had Been Built By The Dead.

I Realize That They Giggle And I Actually Laugh, That They Show Their Cleavage And I Have None To Show, But Just So You Know, I Am Also A Girl. I'm One Of The Three Wise Men. And It's Gay To Think That James Bond Is Hot.

That's The Thing About Pain, It Demands To Be Felt.

We Only Have So Long To Play In The Dirt And Ask Questions Of Rivers.

Come Over Here So I Can Examine Your Face With My Hands And See Deeper Into Your Soul Than A Sighted Person Ever Could.

I Can't Remember, Because I Never Knew.

It Is Easy To Forget How Full The World Is Of People, Full To Bursting, And Each Of Them Imaginable And Consistently Misimagined.

The United States Congress, Like A Lot Of Rich People, Lives In Two Houses.

I Would Argue That Stupidity Is Born Out Of Bad Reading, Bad Teaching And Bad Thinking!

Nothing (at Least That Can Be Done By Humans) Immortalizes Anyone. The Fault In Our Stars Will Hopefully Have A Long And Wonderful Life, But It Will Eventually Go Out Of Print, And Eventually The Last Person Ever To Read It Will Die, And Then The Characters Will No Longer Live In Any Consciousness.also, That Is Okay. That Is Good, Actually. That Is How It Should Be. One Of The Things The Characters In This Novel Have To Grapple With Is The Reality Of Temporaryness. What Gus In Particular Must Reconcile Himself To Is That Being Temporary Does Not Mean Being Unimportant Or Meaningless.

I Believe In Hope, In What Is Something Called ”radical Hope.” I Believe There Is Hope For All Of Us, Even Amid The Suffering. And That’s Why I Write Fiction, Probaby. It’s My Attempt To Keep That Fragile Strand Of Radical Hope, To Buld A Fire In The Darkness.r

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.

He Told Me This While Ripping Through His Duffel Bag, Throwing Clothes Into Drawers With Reckless Abandon. Chip Did Not Believe In Having A Sock Drawer Or A T-shirt Drawer. He Believed That All Drawers Were Created Equal And Filled Each With Whatever Fit. My Mother Would Have Died.

The Vast Majority Of Us Imagine Ourselves As Like Literature People Or Math People. But The Truth Is That The Massive Processor Known As The Human Brain Is Neither A Literature Organ Or A Math Organ. It Is Both And More.

I Even Tried To Tell Myself To Live My Best Life Today.

At Some Point, You Just Pull Off The Band-aid, And It Hurts, But Then It's Over And You're Relieved.

You Never Know. It's Just. It's Like. Poof. And You're Gone.

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