"Jeb is going to grow up to be the kind of man who spends his Saturdays teaching his little boy to ride a bike. (...) Charlie, on the other hand, will be off playing golf while his kid kills people on his Xbox. Charlie will be dashing and debonair, and he'll buy his kid all kinds of crap, but he'll never actually be there."

"You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it."

"Sorry," I said to the Duke."Eh, it's not your fault. It's Carla's fault. You were turning the wheel. Carla just wasn't listening. I knew I shouldn't have loved her. She's like all the others, Tobin; as soon as I confess my love, she abandons me."I laughed. "I never abandoned you," I said patting on her back."Yeah, well, (a.) I never confessed my love to you, and (b.) I'm not even female to you."

"Don't worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway."

"There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that's one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards."

"If you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain."

"He's not that smart."She's right, Augustus says. "It's just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations."Right, it's primarily his hotness."It can be sort of blinding, he said."It actually did blind our friend Isaac."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."

"What the hell is that?" I laughed."It's my fox hat.""Your fox hat?""Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat.""Why are you wearing your fox hat?" I asked."Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox."

"Be present in this class. And then, when it's over, be present out there."

"Where is my chance to be somebody's Peter Van Houten?' He hit the steering wheel weakly, the car honking as he cried. He leaned his head back, looking up. 'I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me fucking die."

"Later, I walked towards the dorm circle beside Alaska. The cicadas hummed their one-note song, just as they had at home in Florida. She turned to me as we made our way through the darkness and said,"When you're walking at night, do you ever get creeped out and even though it's silly and embarrassing you just want to run home?It seemed too secret and personal to admit to a virtual stranger but I told her, "Yeah, totally.For a moment, she was quiet. Then she grabbed my hand, whispered,"Run run run run run, and took off, pulling me behind her."

"People are supposed to care. It's good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they're gone."

"I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life.."

"The humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show them how we feel."

"Why are you looking at me like that?"Augustus half smiled. "Because you`re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence."

"I did some research on this a couple years ago," Augustus continued. "I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?""And are there?" "Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about."

"You gave me forever within the numbered days."

"Right, except I'm not going to lie to my mom, because what kind of bastard lies to his own mother?"

"Photographs are just light and time" - Aza Holmes."

"Every year, many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you."

"Something about telling that story made my gut grow back together."What?"Oh, nothing. Just thinking out loud."That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of."The people who've been in your secret hiding places."The people you bite your thumb in front of."Hi."Hi."..."..."Wow. My first Lindsey."My second Colin."That was fun. Let's try it again."Sold."..."..."..."..."

"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."

"That doesn't sound like my Margo", she said, and I thought of my Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different funhouse mirrors."

"When adults say, 'Teenagers think they are 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. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."

"If you dont' live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good."

"This one's for Alaska Young!"

"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."

"The afternoon light brightening the green in her eyes, her tan skin the last memory of fall."

"Such was life that morning: 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."

"You could hold me and I could hold you. And it would be so peaceful. Completely peaceful. Like the feeling of sleep, but awake in it together."

"And, since they are theater people, they are all talking. All of them. Simultaneously. They do not need to be heard; they only need to be speaking."

"Pg. 231-232: They'd given me a minivan. They could have picked any car and they picked a minivan. A minivan. O God of the Vehicular Justice, why dost thou mock me? Minivan, you albatross around my neck! You mark of Cain! You wretched beast high ceilings and few horsepower!"

"True love will triumph in the end-which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have."

"I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occured 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."

"I walked to his bedside table next. Infinite Mayhem. the ninth sequel to The Prince of Dawn, lay atop the table next to his reading lamp, the corner of page 138 turned down. He'd never made it to the end of the book. 'Spoiler alert: Mayhem survives,' I said out loud to him, just in case he could hear me."

"I know love is real because I feel it."

"Everything looks uglier close up."

"She loves mysteries that she became one."

"I wanted us to have an adventure. Because I love that crap. Because I'm not whatever-her-name-is. I don't think it's oh so hard to walk four miles in the snow. I want that. I love that."

"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 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."

"I am concussed,' I announced, entirely sure of my self-diagnosis.''You're fine,' Takumi said as he jogged back towards me. ''Let's get out of here before we're killed.''''I'm sorry,' I said. ''But I can't get up. I have suffered a mild concussion.''Lara ran out and sat down next to me.''Are you OK?''''I am concussed,'' I said.Takumi sat down with me and looked me in the eye. ''Do you know what happened to you?''''The beast got me.''''Do you know where you are?''''I'm on a triple-and-a-half date.''''You're fine,'' Takumi said. ''Let's go.''And then I leaned forward and threw up on Lara's pants."

"I figured something out," he said aloud. "The future is unpredictable."Hassan said, "Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice."

"I am in love with you, and I am not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things."

"If people were rain, I'd be a drizzle and she'd be a hurricane."

"The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before."

"Your professional physicist opinion?" I ask.She smiles. "I believe the cat to be alive. And what says my esteemed colleague?""Alive," I say."

"It s a metaphor: you see, you put the killing thing right between your teeth,you just don't give it the power to do it's killing."

"I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now."

"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."