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But Ultimately I Do Not Believe That She Was Only Matter. The Rest Of Her Must Be Recycled, Too. I Believe Now That We Are Greater Than The Sum Of Our Parts. If You Take Alaska's Genetic Code And You Add Her Life Experiences And The Relationships She Had With People, And Then You Take The Size And Shape Of Her Body, You Do Not Get Her. There Is Something Else Entirely. 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

-John Green

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But Ultimately I Do

John Green

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But Ultimately I Do Not Believe That She Was Only Matter. The Rest Of Her Must Be Recycled, Too. I Believe Now That We Are Greater Than The Sum Of Our Parts. If You Take Alaska's Genetic Code And You Add Her Life Experiences And The Relationships She Had With People, And Then You Take The Size And Shape Of Her Body, You Do Not Get Her. There Is Something Else Entirely. 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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The Ideas Of Directing Attention Outward, Trying To Imagine Other People Complexly, Trying Not To See Myself As The Center Of The Universe - These Concepts Have Become Important To Me, And I Hope They're At Work In My Life On A Minute-by-minute Basis.

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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.

The Challenge Is The Same Whether Or Not I'm Collaborating: To Empathize With Your Reader And To Tell A Story That Will Matter To Him Or Her. But The Mechanics Of Going About That Challenge Change When You're Collaborating, Because You Have Someone To Help Refine Your Thinking And Expand Your Vision Of What Might Happen.

You Can Pick Your Friends, And You Can Pick Your Nose, But You Can’t Pick Your Friend’s Nose.

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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.

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.

But There Was Nothing I Could Do To Dim The Supernovae Exploding Inside My Brain, An Endless Chain Of Intra Cranial Firecrackers

Because No One Thought She Was A Person, She Had No One To Really Talk To.

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We Just Did An Awesome Job Of Not Dying.

You Realize That Trying To Keep Your Distance From Me Will Not Lessen My Affection For You. All Efforts To Save Me From You Will Fail.

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When People Call People Nerds, Mostly What They're Saying Is, 'you Like Stuff.' Which Is Not A Good Insult At All, Like, 'you Are Too Enthusiastic About The Miracle Of Human Conscience.

If We Restructure Things To See That The Hero's Journey Is A Degree In Astrophysics Rather Than A Journey To Star In A Reality Show, That's A Better World.

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That Is The Fear: I Have Lost Something Important, And I Cannot Find It, And I Need It. It Is Fear Like If Someone Lost His Glasses And Went To The Glasses Store And They Told Him That The World Had Run Out Of Glasses And He Would Just Have To Do Without.

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

I Was So Frustrated With Him. "i Just Want To Be Enough For You, But I Never Can Be. This Can Never Be Enough For You. But This Is All You Get. You Get Me, And Your Family, And This World. This Is Your Life. I'm Sorry If It Sucks. But You're Not Going To Be The First Man On Mars, And You're Not Going To Be An Nba Star, And You're Not Going To Hunt Nazis.

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It Was Not Enough To Be The Last Guy She Kissed. I Wanted To Be The Last One She Loved. And I Knew I Wasn’t. I Knew It, And I Hated Her For It. I Hated Her For Not Caring About Me. I Hated Her For Leaving That Night, And I Hated Myself , Too, Not Only Because I Let Her Go But Because If I Had Been Enough For Her, She Wouldn’t Have Even Wanted To Leave. She Would Have Just Lain With Me And Talked And Cried, And I Would Have Listened And Kissed At Her Tears As They Pooled In Her Eyes.

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It's Just That I Learned A While Ago That The Best Way To Get People To Like You Is Not To Like Them Too Much.

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That's The Great Thing About Being In The Third Grade. If You've Got One Polysyllabic Adjective, Everyone Thinks You're A Genius.

Suffering Is Universal.

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

Not To Ask The Obvious Question, But Why Alaska?

...it Occurred To Me That The Voracious Ambition Of Humans Is Never Sated By Dreams Coming True, Because There Is Always The Thought That Everything Might Be Done Better And Again.

And I Agreed, But Still, She Owed Us An Explanation. If She Was Up There, Down There, Out There, Somewhere, Maybe She Would Laugh.

At Least I Carpe'd That One Diem.

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There Is No Try. There Is Only Do.

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Scared Isn't A Good Excuse. Scared Is The Excuse Everyone Has Always Used.

I Was Not Religious, But I Liked Rituals. I Liked The Idea Of Connecting An Action With Remembering.

I'm Not Interested In Writing For Adults. I Like Them As People! I Don't Like The Way They Publish Books In That World. Nothing Ever Gets A Chance.

Keys Show Up When You Reconcile Yourself To The Bus.

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He Missed Her Like Crazycakes.

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I'm So Proud Of You That It Makes Me Proud Of Me. I Hope You Know That.

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A Margo For Each Of Us--and Each More Mirror Than Window.

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One Of The Others Shouted A Translation: "the Beautiful Couple Is Beautiful.

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Depression Is A Side Effect Of Dying. (almost Everything Is, Really).

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

"and We'll Call You... Hmmm. Pudge." "huh?" "pudge," The Colonel Said. "because You're Skinny. It's Called Irony, Pudge. Heard Of It? Now, Let's Go Get Some Cigarettes And Start This Year Off Right."

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I Will Play Out The String. I Will Not Betray Your Trust. I Will Find You.

Isaac Out Of Surgery. It Went Well. He's Officially Nec. Nec Meant "no Evidence Of Cancer." A Second Text Came A Few Seconds Later. I Mean, He's Blind. So That's Unfortunate.

Our Role As Humans Is To Recognize The Complexity Of Others.

There's Some People In This World Who You Can Just Love And Love And Love No Matter What.

Incidentally, Did You Know That The Whole Eight Glasses A Day Thing Is Complete Bullshit And Has No Scientific Basis? So Many Things Are Like That. Everyone Just Assumes They're True, Because People Are Basically Lazy And Incurious, Which Incidentally Is One Of Those Words That Sounds Like It Wouldn't Be A Word But Is.

Just A Word Of Advice. Whenever You're Furious With Your Parents Or You Think They're Terrible, Just Remember, You Vomited On Them And They Kept You.

My Head Was Level With Hers As We Stared At Each Other From Opposite Sides Of The Glass. I Don't Remember How It Ended - If I Went To Bed Or She Did. In My Memory, It Doesn't End. We Just Stay There, Looking At Each Other, Forever.

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.

They Like Their Coffee Like They Like Their Ex-boyfriends: Bitter.

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

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You Die In The Middle Of Your Life.

Fault In Our Stars

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So You've Been Gone A Couple Days,' Alison Said. 'hmm, What'd You Miss...a Celebrity Did Drugs. Politicians Disagreed. A Different Celebrity Wore A Bikini That Revealed A Bodily Imperfection. A Team Won A Sporting Event, But Another Team Lost.

The Things I Would Do To That Boy. I Mean, Not Now That I Know You're Interested In Him. But, Oh, Sweet Holy Lord, I Would Ride That One-legged Pony All The Way Around The Corral." "kaitlyn," I Said. "sorry. Do You Think You'd Have To Be On Top?" "kaitlyn," I Said.

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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.

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.

We Landed, In Fact, Parallel To A Canal, Like There Were Two Runways: One For Us And One For Waterfowl.

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

I Have An Augustus Waters Fetish.

It Is Worth It To Leave Behing My Minor Life For Grander Maybes.

Your Driving Is Unpleasant, But It Isn't Technically Unsafe.

But I Could Always Tell In Her Eyes If She Got Really Pissed At Me, And Her Eyes Were Still Pretty Smiley

I Can't Be You. You Can't Be Me. You Can Imagine Another Well—but Never Quite Perfectly, You Know?

I Don't Like Reindeer. They Seem Like Regular Deer, Only More Dangerous.

And He Found Himself Thinking That Maybe Stories Don't Just Make Us Matter To Each Other - Maybe They're Also The Only Way To The Infinite Mattering He'd Been After For So Long.

Ultimately, It Doesn't Matter If The Author Intended A Symbol To Be There, Because The Job Of Reading Is Not To Understand The Authors Intend. The Job Of Reading Is To See Into Other People As We See Ourselves.

Ma'am," Augustus Said, Nodding Toward Her, "your Daughter's Car Has Just Been Deservingly Egged By A Blind Man. Please Close The Door And Go Back Inside Or We'll Be Forced To Call The Police.

He Missed That, Too, And It Hadn't Even Happened.

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.

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

He Is Both The Source Of My Happiness And The One I Want To Share It With. I Have To Believe That’s A Sign.

Tobin," Mom Said Disapprovingly. She Wasn't A Particularly Funny Person. It Suited Her Professionally - I Mean, You Don't Want Your Cancer Surgeon To Walk Into The Examination Room And Be Like, "guy Walks Into A Bar. Bartender Says, 'what'll Ya Have?' And The Guy Says, 'whaddya Got?' And The Bartender Says, 'i Don't Know What I Got, But I Know What You Got: Stage Iv Melanoma.

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

Everlasting Life

I Don't Think We Should See The World Of Books As Fundamentally Separate From The World Of The Internet. Yes, The Internet Contains A Lot Of Videos Of Squirrels Riding Skateboards, But It Can Also Be A Place That Facilitates Big Conversations About Books.

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

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Margaret Atwood

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