"Keeping the box closed just keeps you in the dark, not the universe... but failing to open the box doesn't kill the cat."

"Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you," and the Colonel whispered, "I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did," and I said, "No. Not past tense." She wasn't even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense."

"Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest."

"Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?" "Sometimes people don't always understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said.Isaac shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?"I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer.But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it."

"On some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are."

"Nerd life is just so much better than regular life."

"I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they were so blue. "There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed for that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you."

"He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. 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."

"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."

"You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves."

"He was a dying man looking down on the surgeons trying to save him."

"I lit up like a Christmas tree-Augustus Waters."

"AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!' he screamed.'So that's Sara,' I said.'Yes.''She seems nice."

"There is no try. There is only do."

"Colder by the hour, more dead with every breath."

"Harry Potter isn't real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I don't know who you are or what your name is or where you're from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter's real and you're not."

"One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It's all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around."

"This squirrel is inadequately afraid of humans! Squirrel, I am a threat to you! We are enemies! Please get off my bench! Oh, god! Oh, god! Don't touch me-oh, god!"

"I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and Ihated people who didn't hate people who watched or played them."

"I bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be all like, 'I'm busy, I got a job, I got stuff to do.' WHATEVER! READ! I mean, you're watching CSI: Miami. Why would you be watching CSI: Miami, when you could be READING CSI: Miami, the novelization?"

"In the best conversations, you don't even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It felt like we were in some place your body can't visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments."

"I don't think your missing pieces ever go inside you again once they go missing."

"Peter Van Houten was the only person I'd ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it'slike to be dying, and (b) not have died."

"Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul."

"I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose."

"No, I don't think you're gonna be single forever, and also I don't understand your obsession with romantic love. There are other ways to have fulfilling relationships that can sustain you and make your life great and fun other than having a sexualized relationship. It's not the only kind of fulfilling human interaction. So, even if you are single forever, that doesn't mean that you've had some kind of failed life."

"We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken."

"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 are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner."

"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."

"Like they just wanted to enjoy The Gus Waters Show while it was still in town."

"That brief walk was 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."

"Chip, she's gone, and he said, "I thought I'd feel her looking down on us, but you're right. She's just gone."

"You used," he said, and then took a sharp breath, "to call me Augustus."

"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?"

"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."

"This is your war now.' I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?'Some war,' 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 are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Graze, with a predetermined winner."

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves. Easy enough to say when you're a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars."

"As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story."

"Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears."

"No headboards were broken."

"The missing piece in his stomach hurt so much-and eventually he stopped thinking about the Theorem and wondered only how something that isn't there can hurt you."

"When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement."

"In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of the century, might be forgotten. 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."

"I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence."

"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."

"We were just standing there, and her eyes were so interesting. Not in the usual way of being interesting, like being extremely blue or extremely big or flanked by obscenely long lashes or anything."

"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."

"Headline?" he asked."'Swing Set Needs Home,'" I said."'Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,'" he said."'Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,'" I said."

"But there was nothing I could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intra cranial firecrackers."

"The only person I really wanted to talk about Augustus Waters was Augustus Waters."