"Her underwear, her jeans, the comforter, my corduroys and my boxers between us, I thought. Five layers, and yet I felt it, the nervous warmth of touching " a pale reflection of the fireworks of one mouth on another, but a reflection nonetheless. And in the almostness of the moment, I cared at least enough. I wasn't sure whether I liked her, and doubted whether I could trust her, but I cared at least enough to try to find out. Her on my bed, wide green eyes staring down at me. The enduring mystery of her sly, almost smirking, smile. Five layers between us."

"Books-they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions."

"Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life."

"Well to be fair, I said, I mean she probably can't handle it. Neither can you, but she doesn't have to handle it. And you do."

"I know it's impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you're older, you start to see them-the bad kids and the good kids and all kids-as people. They're just people, who deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self- actualized."

"But of course, the universe does not conspire to put you in one place rather than another."

"The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was."

"There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer."

"Dumpers are not inherently worse than Dumpees-breaking up isn't something that gets done to you, it's something that happens with you."

"There's no romance in geometry," Lindsey answered. "Just you wait."

"I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering."

"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?"

"Because it's kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place where a paper creation became real. A dot on the map became a real place, more real than the people who created the dot could never have imagined. I thought maybe the paper cutout of a girl could start becoming real here also. And it seemed like a way to tell that paper girl who cared about popularity and clothes and everything else: 'You are going to the paper towns. And you are never coming back."

"Paper Towns for a Paper Girl, who wants to think and read clearly."

"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."

"This is the rough part, okay? so just stay tuned for the good part. i promise it'll come soon."

"But there was so much todo: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I'll have more time for reading when I'm old and boring."

"Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets."

"But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck."

"I thought: 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 they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without."

"He reached up t0 grab one and came down with several, and they kept coming, washing over him, floating all around him. Never have tampon strings seemed so beautiful as they rolled up and down with the wind, landing on the ground and then twirling and floating up again, falling and rising and falling and rising."

"Some infinities are bigger than other infinities."

"In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it's printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you."

"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 smiled. 'You can't go disappearing on everybody like this, Hazel. You miss too much."

"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."

"Grief does not change you. It reveals you."

"If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of."

"But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?-Aza."

"Why is being a nerd so bad? saying " I noticed you're a nerd is like saying hey, I noticed you'd rather be intelligent that stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan."

"Principled hate is a hell of a lot stronger than "Boy, I wish you hadn't mummified me and thrown me into the lake" hate."

"We all romanticize the people we adore."

"And then I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out my cannula so I could smell better, breathing him and out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest burning until I couldn't distinguish among the pains."

"I want to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn't planning or doing or leaving, the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together."

"We bring the fucking rain Q, not the scattered showers."

"What else? She is so beautiful. 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 love her, Van Houten. You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.I do, Augustus.I do."

"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."

"But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER."

"I figured something out. The future is unpredictable."

"You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends nose."

"Honestly, I don't even like my type of girl that much, let alone other types. Not that I'm asexual or something - I just find Romance Drama unbearable."

"She laughed. ''You seem pretty normal.''''You've never seen Ben snort Sprite up his nose and then spit it out of his mouth,'' I said.''I look like a demented carbonated fountain,'' he deadpanned."

"Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start."

"I'd pick you, I say. Fuck it, I do pick you. I want you to come over to my house in twenty years with your dud and your adopted kids and I want our fucking kids to hang out and I want to, like, drink wine and talk about the Middle East or whatever the fuck we're gonna want to do when we're old. We've been friends too long to pick, but if we could pick, I'd pick you."

"Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher's last words were "Now comes the mystery." The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that's a record," before dying. Alaska's favorite was playwright Eugene O'Neill: "Born in a hotel room, and--God damn it--died in a hotel room." Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, "Oh God. What's happened?" Movie star James Dean said, "They've got to see us," just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers."

"Were she better, or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves."

"We are literally in the heart of Jesus," he said."I thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus.""Someone should tell Jesus," I said. "I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart."

"Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good-and amazingly underutilized-resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences."

"I don't suppose I can wear the flamingo tie," he said as he pulled on black socks. "It's a bit festive, given the occasion," I responded. "Can't wear it to the opera," said the Colonel, almost smiling. "Can't wear it to a funeral. Can't use it to hang myself. It's a bit useless, as ties go." I gave him a tie."

"Thank you for letting me hijack your wish', I said.'Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa," he said."

"Imagine others complexly."