"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!"

"She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin's so pale she looks like she's just broken dawn."

"Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music."

"What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding in an hour."

"You were with Margo Roth Spiegelman last night? At THREE A.M.? I nodded. Alone? I nodded. Oh my God, if you hooked up with her, you have to tell me every single thing that happened. You have to write me a term paper on the look and feel of Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts. Thrity pages, minimum! I want you to do a photo-realistic pencil drawing. A sculpture would also be acceptable. I was wondering if it would be possible for you to write a sestina about Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts? Your six words are: pink, round, firmness, succulent, supple, and pillowy. Personally, I think at least one of the words should be buhbuhbuhbuh."

"The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn't over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you as if it were a secret, and an immense one."

"Dude, I don't want to talk about Lacey's prom shoes. And I'll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It's called a penis."

"She cannot possibly be dead, people do not just die."

"You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to lover her."

"There is no Them. There are only facets of Us."

"Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doin."

"I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together."

"Ma'am,' Augustus said, nodding toward her, 'your daughter's car has just been deservedly egged by a blind man. Please close the door and go back inside or we'll be forced to call the police.' After wavering for a moment, Monica's mom closed the door and disappeared."

"A sequel that will exist just for us."

"The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle."

"Sometimes people don't understandthe 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'swhat love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?"

"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."

"We are living the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else's misfortune."

"Some people have lives, some people have music."

"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."

"People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember."

"You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I can't remember, because I never knew."

"Let me just acknowlege that the function of grammar is to make language as efficent and clear and transparent as possible. But if we're all constantly correcting each other's grammar and being really snotty about it, then people stop talking because they start to be petrified that they're going to make some sort of terrible grammatical error and that's precisely the opposite of what grammar is supposed to do, which is to facilitate clear communication."

"I wasn't disappointed. My expectations had been met."

"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."

"Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin."

"They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting."

"The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention."

"We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?"

"I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater. But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried."

"Worry is yet another side effect of dying."

"In the ensuing silence, I have the time to contemplate the word cute " how dismissive it is, how it's the equivalent of calling someone little, how it makes a person into a baby, how the word is a neon sign burning through the dark reading, "Feel Bad About Yourself."

"I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to."

"I'm in love with you," he said quietly."Augustus," I said."I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you."

"Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning she haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again."

"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?"

"You can't burn down a made-up place."

"I will play out the string. I will not betray your trust. I will find you."

"I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. 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 hopelessly 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 hurricane."

"Both my parents are therapists, which means that I am really goddamned well adjusted."

"Cousin-screwing. It is not totally safe. It raises the risk of birth defects slightly. But I was reading in a book for history that there's, like, a 99.9999 percent chance that at least one of your great-great-great-grandparents married first cousin."

"Issac:"I dislike living in a world without Augustus Waters."Computer: "I don't understand-"Issac: "Me neither. Pause."

"I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite."

"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."

"He just waited until I stopped talking and said, 'Jesus, kid, you're almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what's your theory?"

"That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste."

"I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten."

"And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future-you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can't afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college."

"And I told myself -- as I've told myself before -- that the body shuts down then the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown."

"The marks humans leave are too often scars."