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I Enjoy Writing About People Falling In Love, Probably Because I Think The First Time You Fall In Love Is The First Time That You Have To Figure Out How You're Going To Orient Your Life. What Are You Going To Value? What's Going To Be Most Important To You? And I Think That's Really Interesting To Write About.

-John Green

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I Enjoy Writing About

John Green

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I Enjoy Writing About People Falling In Love, Probably Because I Think The First Time You Fall In Love Is The First Time That You Have To Figure Out How You're Going To Orient Your Life. What Are You Going To Value? What's Going To Be Most Important To You? And I Think That's Really Interesting To Write About.

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Falling In Love

More From John Green

Did I Help You Toward A Fate You Didn't Want, Alaska, Or Did I Just Assist In Your Willful Self-destruction?

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.

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.

I Feel Like Crying, So I Must Be Crying, But It's Impossible To Tell Because I'm Underwater.

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

Mental Health Days Only Exist For People Who Have The Luxury Of Saying 'i Don't Want To Deal With Things Today' And Then Can Take The Whole Day Off, While The Rest Of Us Are Stuck Fighting The Fights We Always Fight, With No One Really Caring One Way Or Another, Unless...

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

We’re As Likely To Hurt The Universe As We Are To Help It, And We’re Not Likely To Do Either.

Tiny Cooper Is Not The World's Gayest Person, And He Is Not The World's Largest Person, But I Believe He May Be The World's Largest Person Who Is Really, Really Gay, And Also The World's Gayest Person Who Is Really, Really Large.

So Keeping The Box Closed Just Keeps You In The Dark, Not The Universe.

I Thought Of The One Thing About Home That I Missed, My Dad's Study With Its Built-in, Floor-to-ceiling Shelves Sagging With Thick Biographies And The Black Leather Chair That Kept Me Just Uncomfortable Enough To Keep From Feeling Sleepy As I Read.

We Had To Forgive To Survive The Labyrinth

Augustus Waters Was The Great Star-crossed Love Of My Life. Ours Was An Epic Love Story, And I Won’t Be Able To Get More Than A Sentence Into It Without Disappearing Into A Puddle Of Tears. Gus Knew. Gus Knows. I Will Not Tell You Our Love Story, Because—like All Real Love Stories—it Will Die With Us, As It Should.

You Do Not Immortalize The Lost By Writing About Them. Language Buries, But Does Not Resurrect.

Sometimes, You Read A Book And It Fills You With This Weird Evangelical Zeal, And You Become Convinced That The Shattered World Will Never Be Put Back Together Unless And Until All Living Humans Read The Book.

Our Fearlessness Shall Be Our Secret Weapon.

We All Miss You So Much. It Just Never Ends. It Feels Like We Were All Wounded In Your Battle, Caroline. I Miss You. I Love You.

Love Is The Most Common Miracle.

I'm Interested In Internet Cultures. I'm Interested In What The Teenagers Who Drive The Internet Culture Are Passionate About. I Follow Their Lead - They Go To Tumblr, I Go To Tumblr.

Issac:"i Dislike Living In A World Without Augustus Waters." Computer: "i Don't Understand-" Issac: "me Neither. Pause

I Still Think That Maybe The "afterlife" Is Just Something We Made Up To Ease The Pain Of Loss, To Make Our Time In The Labyrinth Bearable. Maybe We Are Just Matter, And Matter Gets Recycled

I Was A Fairly Shy Person - Not The Hand Raising Type.

High School Is Neither A Democracy Nor A Dictatorship - Nor, Contrary To Popular Belief, An Anarchic State. High School Is A Divine-right Monarchy. And When The Queen Goes On Vacation, Things Change.

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

Cherish Every Moment

The Pure And Simple Truth Is Rarely Pure And Never Simple. What's A Boy To Do When Lies And Truth Are Both Sinful?

If Drunk Were Cookies, I'd Be Famous Amos

From The Front Rdar Announces, "don't You Go Talking Bad About Gofast Bars. Do You Want Me To Stop This Car?" "whenever I Eat A Gofast Bar," Ben Says, "i'm Always Like, 'so This Is What Blood Tastes Like To Mosquitoes.

No Woman Should Ever Lie About Another Woman. You've Violated The Sacred Covenant Between Women! How Will Stabbing One Another In The Back Help Women To Rise Above Patriarchal Oppression?

My Parents Always Liked It When I Cursed In Front Of Them. I Could See The Pleasure Of It In Their Faces. It Signified That I Trusted Them, That I Was Myself In Front Of Them.

She's Just Playing A Trick On Us. This Is Just An Alaska Young Prank Extraordinaire. It's Alaska Being Alaska, Funny And Playful And Not Knowing When Or How To Put On The Brakes.

She Said Robert Joyner Had Killed Himself With A Gun. And Then I Asked Why, And Then She Told Me That He Was Getting A Divorce And Was Sad About It.' 'lots Of People Get Divorces And Don't Kill Themselves,' I Said. 'i Know,' She Said, Excitement In Her Voice. 'that's What I Told Her.

The Act Of Leaning In To Kiss Someone, Or Asking Them, Is Fraught With The Possibility Of Rejection, So The Person Least Likely To Get Rejected Should Do The Leaning In Or The Asking.

Memories Fall Apart Too.

I Was Struck By An Awful Thought, The Kind That Cannot Be Taken Back Once It Escapes Into The Open Air Of Consciousness; It Seemed To Me That This Was Not A Place You Go To Live. It Was A Place You Go To Die.

I'll Just Go Over To The Duke's," I Said. "her Parents Already Told Me I Could Stay There. I'll Go Over There And Open All My Presents, And Talk About How My Parents Neglect Me, And Then Maybe The Duke Will Give Me Some Of Her Presents Because She Feels So Bad About How My Mom Doesn't Love Me.

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.

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

People Thought He Was A Glutton For Punishment, That He Liked Getting Dumped. But It Wasn't Like That. He Could Just Never See Anything Coming, And As He Lay On The Solid, Uneven Ground With Hassan Pressing Too Hard On His Forehead, Colin Singleton's Distance From His Glasses Made Him Realize The Problem: Myopia. He Was Nearsighted. The Future Lay Before Him, Inevitable But Invisible.

The French Verb Aimer Has Two Meanings. And That’s Why He Liked Her, And Loved Her. She Spoke To Him In A Language That, No Matter How Hard You Studied It, Could Not Be Completely Understood.

It Is So Hard To Leave—until You Leave. And Then It Is The Easiest Goddamned Thing In The World.

I Change My Keyboard Between Every Book. I Usually Shop Around. I'm Very Passionate About The Physical Feel Of Pressing The Keys. It's Got To Have The Right Springiness. I Tend To Find The Built-in Keys Very Unsatisfying, The Keys Are Low-profile And Don't Really Do Anything - I Want It To Feel Like I'm Typing.

Sexuality Is Important, But It's Certainly Not The Most Interesting Or Important Thing Happening To You Right Now. We Live In A World That Tells Us That There Are Only Two Important Things. One Is The Acquisition Of Goods And The Other Is Either The Acquisition Or Avoidance Of Sex, But It Turns Out That The Question Of Who's A Virgin And Who's A Virgout Is Not The Most Interesting Question.

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!

Late In The Winter Of My Seventeenth Year, My Mother Decided I Was Depressed, Presumably Because I Rarely Left The House, Spent Quite A Lot Of Time In Bed, Read The Same Book Over And Over, Ate Infrequently, And Devoted Quite A Bit Of My Abundant Free Time To Thinking About Death.

In General, Watching Children's Television Is A Dark And Surreal Descent Into Madness Where The Characters On The Screen Talk Directly To You.

Mom Sobbed Something Into Dad's Chest That I Wish I Hadn't Heard, And That I Hope She Never Finds Out That I Did Hear. She Said, "i Won't Be A Mom Anymore." It Gutted Me Pretty Badly.

Nothing Was Happening, Really, But The Moment Was Thick With Mattering

I Stand In This Parking Lot, Realizing That I’ve Never Been This Far From Home, And Here Is This Girl I Love And Cannot Follow. I Hope This Is The Hero’s Errand, Because Not Following Her Is The Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done.

Teenagers Are Extremely Funny, And Extremely Clever And Intellectually Curious. But They're Also Willing To Ask Questions About The Meaning Of Life Without Disguising Them Around Irony, And Ask Questions About What Are Our Responsibilities To Other People Without Having To Couch It In Irony.

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.

Muhammad Brought The Promise That Anyone Could Find Fulfillment And Everlasting Life Through Allegiance To The One True God. The Buddah Held Out Hope That The Suffering Could Be Transcended. Jesus Brought The Message That Even The Last Shall Be First, That Even The Tax Collectors And Lepers - The Outcasts - Had Cause For Hope. And So That Is The Question I Leave You With In This Final: What Is Your Cause For Hope.

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

Gratitude Is The Proper Response For The Absolute Astonishment Of Getting To Be Alive, And Aware, And An Essential Part Of This Crazy, Sprawling Story.

My Lungs Sucked At Being Lungs.

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

Ergo: Girls Should Always Make The First Move, Because (a) They Are, On The Whole, Less Likely To Be Rejected Than Guys, (b) That Way, Girls Will Never Get Kissed Unless They Want To Be Kissed.

Dear Jane, Just So You Know: E. E. Cummings Cheated On Both Of His Wives. With Prostitutes. Yours, Will Grayson

The Truth Is That In Our Lives We Are All Going To Encounter Questions That Should Be Answered, That Deserve To Be Answered, And Yet Prove Unanswerable.

A Paper Town For A Paper Girl.

Facts, Even False Ones, Cannot Be Copyrighted.

Before I Got Here, I Thought For A Long Time That The Way Out Of The Labyrinth Was To Pretend That It Did Not Exist, To Build A Small, Self-sufficient World In The Back Corner Of The Endless Maze And To Pretend That I Was Not Lost, But Home.

He Wanted To Draw Out The Moment Before The Moment- Because As Good As Kissing Feels, Nothing Feels As Good As The Anticipation Of It.

I Hadn’t Read A Real Series Like That Since I Was A Kid, And It Was Exciting To Live Again In An Infinite Fiction.

You Could Hear The Wind In The Leaves, And On That Wind Traveled The Screams Of The Kids On The Playground In The Distance, The Little Kids Figuring Out How To Be Alive, How To Navigate A World That Was Not Built For Them By Navigating A Playground That Was. . . Who Am I To Say That These Things Might Not Be Forever? Who Is Pete Van Houten To Assert As Fact The Conjecture That Our Labor Is Temporary? All I Know Of Heaven And All I Know Of Death Is In This Park: An Elegant Universe In Ceaseless Motion, Teeming With Ruined Ruins And Screaming Children.

It's Almost As If The Way You Imagine My Dead Self Says More About You Than It Says About Either The Person I Was Or The Whatever I Am Now.

I'm Not Embarrassed By My Faith, And I'm Also Not Embarrassed By My Doubt.

Like, In General I Think People Have Very Complicated Reasons For Wanting Things, And We Often Have No Idea Whether We’re Actually Motivated By Altruism Or A Desire To Hook Up Or A Search For Answers Or What. I Always Get Annoyed When In Books Or Movies Characters Want Clear Things For Clear Reasons, Because My Experience Of Humanness Is That I Always Want Messy Things For Messy Reasons.

I'm Not Interested In Dating A Girl I'm Not Gonna Marry

Almost Everyone Is Obsessed With Leaving A Mark Upon The World. Bequeathing A Legacy. Outlasting Death. We All Want To Be Remembered. I Do, Too. That’s What Bothers Me Most, Is Being Another Unremembered Casualty In The Ancient And Inglorious War Against Disease.

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.

As Far As All Of Our Identities Are Dependent On How Other People Imagine Us We Are All Making Ourselves And Each Other Up All The Time

The Part I Enjoy Most Is Not The Doing, But The Noticing.

..there She Is, And I Am Watching Her Through Plexiglass, And She Looks Like Margo Roth Spiegelman, This Girl I Have Known Since I Was Two–this Girl Who Was An Idea That I Loved. And It Is Only Now, When She Closes Her Notebook And Places It Inside A Backpack Next To Her And Then Stands Up And Walks Toward Us, That I Realize That The Idea Is Not Only Wrong By Dangerous. What A Treacherous Thing It Is To Believe That A Person Is More Than A Person.

The Urge To Make Art Or Contemplate Philosophy Does Not Go Away When You Are Sick. Those Urges Just Become Transfigured By Illness.

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

Pudge, My Friend, We Are Indefuckingstructible.

And As Paralyzing And Upsetting As All The Never Agains Were, The Final Leaving Felt Perfect. Pure. The Most Distilled Possible Form Of Liberation.

I Believe In That Line From An Imperial Affliction. 'the Risen Sun Too Bright In Her Losing Eyes.' That's God, I Think, The Rising Sun, And The Light Is Too Bright And Her Eyes Are Losing But They Aren't Lost.

It's Hard As Hell To Hold On To Your Dignity When The Risen Sun Is Too Bright In Your Losing Eyes, And That's What I Was Thinking About As We Hunted For Bad Guys Through The Ruins Of A City That Didn't Exist.

Writing Does Not Resurrect. It Buries.

One Of The Things I Like About Making Stuff In The Age Of The Internet, Is That People Make Stuff In Response To It. You Can See People Respond To Your Work Visually Or Musically Or With Writing.

Good Friends Are Hard To Find And Impossible To Forget.

Impossible To Forget

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.

There Was Time Before Organisms Experienced Consciousness, And There Will Be Time After. And If The Inevitability Of Human Oblivion Worries You, I Encourage You To Ignore It.

Hank, When People Call People Nerds Mostly What They're Saying Is,'you Like Stuff'.

Peeing Is Like A Good Book In That It Is Very, Very Hard To Stop Once You Start.

Gus Knew. Gus Knows. I Will Not Tell You Our Love Story, Because—like All Real Love Stories—it Will Die With Us, As It Should. I'd Hoped That He'd Be Eulogizing Me.

I'm On A Roller Coaster That Only Goes Up," He Said. "and It Is My Privilege And My Responsibility To Ride All The Way Up With You," I Said.

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

That's The Mystery, Isn't It? Is The Labyrinth Living Or Dying? Which Is He Trying To Escape---the World Or The End Of It?

It Is So Hard To Leave-until You Leave.

She Raised One Leg And Gave Me All Her Weight As A I Dipped Her. She Either Trusted Me Or Wanted To Fall.

I Was Surprised. I'd Always Associated Belief In Heaven With, Frankly, A Kind Of Intellectual Disengagement. But Gus Wasn't Dumb.

We Were Just Looking At Ideas Of Each Other.

Finally, I Decided That The Proper Strategy Was To Stare Back. Boys Do Not Have A Monopoly On The Staring Business, After All. So I Looked Him Over And Soon It Was A Staring Contest. After A While The Boy Smiled, And Then Finally His Blue Eyes Glanced Away. When He Looked Back At Me, I Flicked My Eyebrows Up To Say, I Win. He Shrugged

I Liked That He Was A Tenured Professor In The Department Of Slightly Crooked Smiles With A Dual Appointments In The Department Of Having A Voice That Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin.

As Long As We Don't Die, This Is Gonna Be One Hell Of A Story.

You're Awfully Philosophical For A Girl That Just Got Busted.

The Only Thing Worse Than Having A Party That No One Attends Is Having A Party Attended Only By Two Vastly, Deeply Uninteresting People.

There Are At Least Two Distinct Meanings Of 'hot': There Is The, Like, Normal Human Definition Which Is That 'this Individual Seems Suitable For Mating'. And Then There's The Weird, Culturally Constructed Definition Of 'hot' Which Means, 'that Individual Is Malnourished And Has Probably Had Plastic Bags Inserted Into Her Breasts'. Like, I Think If You Went Back To The 18th Century And Asked A 15-year-old Boy, 'would You Like To Marry A Woman Who Has Had Plastic Bags Needlessly Inserted Into Her Breasts?' That 15-year-old Boy Would Probably Be Like ... 'what's Plastic?'

I Don't Think You Can Ever Fill The Empty Space With The Thing You Lost.

Still, What Could I Say? That I Didn't Just Feel Depressed - Instead, It Was Like The Depression Was The Core Of Me, Of Every Part Of Me, From My Mind To My Bones? That If He Got Blue, I Got Black? That I Hated Those Pills So Much, Because I Knew How Much I Relied On Them To Live?

We Acknowledge That Being The Person God Made You Cannot Separate You From God's Love.

It's More Impressive," I Said Out Loud. "from A Distance, I Mean. You Can't See The Wear On Things, You Know? You Can't See The Rust Or The Weeds Or The Paint Cracking. You See The Place As Someone Once Imagined It.

What Is The Point Of Being Alive If You Don't At Least Try To Do Something Remarkable?

Thomas Edison's Last Words Were 'it's Very Beautiful Over There'. I Don't Know Where There Is, But I Believe It's Somewhere, And I Hope It's Beautiful.

I Kept Waiting For That Loneliness And Nervousness To Make Me Want To Go Back. But It Never Did.

I Ran Like A Cheetah - Well, Like A Cheetah That Smoked Too Much.

I Wasn't Disappointed. My Expectations Had Been Met.

Study Broadly And Without Fear.

There's Your Labyrinth Of Suffering. We Are All Going. Find Your Way Out Of That Maze.

Leaving Feels Too Good, Once You Leave.

I Hated Cranberry Sauce, But For Some Reason My Mom Persisted In Her Lifelong Belief That It Was My Very Favorite Food, Even Though Every Single Thanksgiving I Politely Declined To Include It On My Plate.

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

We All Romanticize The People We Adore.

It's Like People Believe All You Need To Do Is Like The Same Bands In Order To Be Soulmates. Or Book. Oh My God...you Like The Outsiders Too...it's Like We're The Same Person! No, We're Not. It's Like We Have The Same English Teacher. There's A Difference.

When Surprised And Excited And Innocent Gus Emerged From Grand Gesture Metaphorically Inclined Augustus, I Literally Could Not Resist.

Tiny, The Next Time That You Try To Set Me Up With A Girl With A Secret Boyfriend Can You At Least Inform Me That She Has A Secret Boyfriend? Also, If You Don't Call Me Back Within Five Minutes, I'm Going To Assume You Found A Way Back To Evanston. Furthermore, You Are An Asshat. That Is All.

Uh-uh, Dude. I Tried It Your Way With The Dating And The Girls And The Kissing And The Drama, And Man, I Didn't Like It. Plus, My Best Friend Is A Walking Cautionary Tale Of What Happens To You When Romantic Relationships Don't Involve Marriage. Like You Always Say, Kafir, Everything Ends In Breakup, Divorce, Or Death. I Want To Narrow My Misery Options To Divorce Or Death - That's All.

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.

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.

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

I Tried To Tell Myself That It Could Be Worse, That The World Was Not A Wish-granting Factory, That I Was Living With Cancer Not Dying Of It, That I Mustn't Let It Kill Me Before It Kills Me.

Waffles аrе јust Awesome Bread.

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.

And I Put The Latte Down On A Table, Awash In The Happy Middle Of My Greatest Adventure.

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

Sharing Knowledge

Long Week. Long Month. Long Life.

The Way We Still Essentializ, We're Constantly Essentializing People As Merely Poor, Or Merely Other, And In The End You Can't Have A Relationship With People. I Think The Biggest Job Of Adulthood Is To Learn To Imagine Other People Complexly.

Do You Ever Wonder Whether People Would Like You More Or Less If They Could See Inside You?

I Came Here Looking For A Great Perhaps, For Real Friends And A More-than-minor Life.

Labyrinth Looking For Alaska

It Was Not An Eventful Day. I Should Have Done Extraordinary Things. I Should Have Sucked The Marrow Out Of Life. But On That Day, I Slept Eighteen Hours Out Of A Possible Twenty-four.

There Is Only One Things In This World Shittier Than Biting It From Cancer When You're Sixteen, And That's Having A Kid Who Bites It From Cancer.

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.

In The First Century Ce, Roman Authorities Punished St. Apollonia By Crushing Her Teeth One By One With Pliers. Colin Often Thought About This In Relationship To The Monotony Of Dumping: We Have Thirty-two Teeth. After A While, Having Each Tooth Individually Destroyed Probably Gets Repetitive, Even Dull. But It Never Stops Hurting.

Walt Whitman Is Hot! I Mean, That Guy Could Sound His Barbaric Yawps Over The Roofs Of My World Any Time.

"nothing Ever Happens Like You Imagine It Will," She Says. The Sky Is Like A Monochromatic Contemporary Painting, Drawing Me In With Its Illusion Of Depth, Pulling Me Up. "yeah, That's True," I Say. But Then After I Think About It For A Second, I Add, "but Then Again, If You Don't Imagine, Nothing Ever Happens At All."

I Just Want To Do Something That Matters. Or Be Something That Matters. I Just Want To Matter.

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.

She Didn’t Understand Why It Was Happening,” He Said. “i Had To Tell Her She Would Die. Her Social Worker Said I Had To Tell Her. I Had To Tell Her She Would Die, So I Told Her She Was Going To Heaven. She Asked If I Would Be There, And I Said That I Would Not, Not Yet. But Eventually, She Said, And I Promised That Yes, Of Course, Very Soon. And I Told Her That In The Meantime We Had Great Family Up There That Would Take Care Of Her. And She Asked Me When I Would Be There, And I Told Her Soon. Twenty-two Years Ago.

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.

Like All Sick Children,' He Answered Dispassionately, 'you Say You Don't Want Pity, But Your Very Existence Depends Upon It.

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.

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

Imagining The Future Is A Kind Of Nostalgia. (...) You Spend Your Whole Life Stuck In The Labyrinth, Thinking About How You'll Escape It One Day, And How Awesome It Will Be, And Imagining That Future Keeps You Going, But You Never Do It. You Just Use The Future To Escape The Present.

I Just Want The Pleasure Of Noticing These Things At A Safe Distance.

If I Could Do It All Over Again," He Said, His Speech Slow And Vaguely Mangled By His Massive Lower Lip, "i'd Just Let Myself Be Trampled To Death By The Satan Pig.

If We'd Put Them In A Vase In The Living Room, They Would Have Been Everyone's Flowers. I Wanted Them To Be My Flowers.

"you Are Fairly Smart," I Said After A While. "you Are Fairly Good At Compliments," He Answered.

What A Treacherous Thing To Believe That A Person Is More Than A Person.

Videogame Players Essentially Choose Whether To Win The Game Or To Die Heroically. There's A Certain Glory In Both.

I Don’t Know A Perfect Person. I Only Know Flawed People Who Are Still Worth Loving.

Well, But You Can Eat Grandma's Cookies. They're Not Bad For You. They Were Made By Grandma. Grandma Wouldn't Hurt You.

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.

He Responded A Few Minutes Later. Okay. I Wrote Back. Okay. He Responded: Oh, My God, Stop Flirting With Me!

We Do An Epically Bad Job Of Acknowledging One Another's Work And Checking Our Sources.

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

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

Our Children Are Weird. Nicely Phrased.

While I Did Not Fancy Myself A Particularly Good Person, I Never Thought My First Real Sexual Action Would Be Prostitutional.

She Was Up And Down—from Fire And Brimstone To Smoke And Ashes.

Have You Really Read All Those Books In Your Room?” Alaska Laughing- “oh God No. I’ve Maybe Read A Third Of ‘em. But I’m Going To Read Them All. I Call It My Life’s Library. Every Summer Since I Was Little, I’ve Gone To Garage Sales And Bought All The Books That Looked Interesting. So I Always Have Something To Read.

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

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.

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.

It Always Shocked Me When I Realized That I Wasn’t The Only Person In The World Who Thought And Felt Such Strange And Awful Things.

Love Is Keeping The Promise Anyway.

Keeping Promises

By The Way, I've Decided To Start Referring To Myself Exclusively As 'daddy.' Everytime Daddy Would Otherwise Say 'i' Or 'me,' Daddy Is Now Going To Say 'daddy.

You Know Your Problem, Quentin? You Keep Expecting People Not To Be Themselves.

I'm Sorry," She Says. I Wheel Around. "you Know, You're A Total Know-it-all. And It's Incredibly Rude Sometimes; I Mean, You're Not Perfect Either, And You Act Like It's My Fault But It's Not My Fault For Being Quiet Or Your Fault For Being A Know-it-all. It's Not Your Problem Or My Problem; It's Their Problem. They're The Demented Ones, Not Us, So Don't Take It Out On Me, Because The Only Thing That Holds Things Together For Me Is Having Someone Else On The Not Demented Team.

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.

I Am A Grenade," I Said Again. "i Just Want To Stay Away From People And Read Books And Think And Be With You Guys Because There's Nothing I Can Do About Hurting You: You're Too Invested, So Just Please Let Me Do That, Okay? "i'm Going To Go To My Room And Read For Awhile, Okay? I'm Fine. I Really Am Fine: I Just Want To Go Read For A While.

I Know He's Been Looking Forward To This--and I Know That I've Been Looking Forward To This. But Now I Have To Stop Looking Forward And Start Looking At Where I Am. It's Hard.

Looking Forward

And I Wrote My Way Out Of The Labyrinth.

And I Vaguely Remember Her Smiling At Me From The Door Way The Glittering Ambiguity Of A Girls Smile, Which Seems To Promise An Answer To The Question, But Never Gives It. The Question, The One We’ve All Been Asking Since Girls Stopped Being Gross, The Question That Is To Simple To Be Uncomplicated: Does She Like Me Or Does She Like Me?

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

You Can't Dingleberry That! That's A Flagrant Misuse Of The Dingleberry!

The Existence Of Broccoli Does Not In Any Way Affect The Taste Of Chocolate

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.

The Future Will Erase Everything--there's No Level Of Fame Or Genius That Allows You To Transcend Oblivion. The Infinite Future Makes That Kind Of Mattering Impossible.

The Food Was So Good That With Each Passing Course, Our Conversation Devolved Further Into Fragmented Celebrations Of Its Deliciousness: 'i Want This Dragon Carrot Risotto To Become A Person So I Can Take It To Las Vegas And Marry It.

I Try To Live Life So That I Can Live With Myself.

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.

The Truth Hurts Because It's Real. It Hurts Because It Mattered. And That's An Important Thing To Acknowledge To Yourself.

Ahhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!' He Screamed. 'so That's Sara,' I Said. 'yes.' 'she Seems Nice.

Lacey Shrugged Bashfully. “do You Think I’m Superficial?” “well, Yeah.” I Thought Of Myself Standing Outside Becca’s Bedroom, Hoping She’d Take Her Shirt Off. “but So Am I,” I Added. “so Is Everyone.

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.

Easy Comfort Isn't Comforting

There's Not A Lot Of Room For Un-ironic Emotion In Contemporary Culture. I Think That Irony Is An Important Tool In Dealing With The World As We Find It. It's A Tool Of Protection, But It Can Also Be A Tool Of Incision To Get To Some Truth. But Along The Way Maybe We've Lost Some Of What I Think Of As The Power Of Straightforward Emotion And Earnestness And Seriousness.

I'm A Good Person But A Shitty Writer. You're A Shitty Person But A Good Writer. We'd Make A Good Team.

All Representations Of A Thing Are Inherently Abstract.

The Fundamental Mistake I Had Always Made - And That She Had, In Fairness, Always Led Me To Make - Was This: Margo Was Not A Miracle. She Was Not An Adventure. She Was Not A Fine And Precious Thing. She Was A Girl.

I Leave, And The Leaving Is So Exhilarating I Know I Can Never Go Back. But Then What? Do I Just Keep Leaving Places, And Leaving Them, And Leaving Them, Tramping A Perpetual Journey?

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.

There Is No Try. There Is Only Do.

And In My Classes, I Will Talk Most Of The Time, And You Will Listen Most Of The Time. Because You May Be Smart, But I've Been Smart Longer.

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

You May Choose Your Song, But Know This: Tiny. Cooper. Hates. Over. The. Rainbow.

The Sun Was A Toddler Insistently Refusing To Go To Bed: It Was Past Eight Thirty And Still Light.

I Love Making Youtube Videos. I Love Tumblr, I Love Twitter. I Love Talking With People I Find Interesting About Stuff I Find Interesting, And The Internet Is A Great Way To Do That.

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