"Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children."

"She said, "It's not life or death, the labyrinth.""Um, okay. So what is it?""Suffering," she said. "Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?... Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about."

"You realise that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you, he said."

"My dad finished chewing something and then put his fork down and looked at me. 'The longer I do my job,' he said. 'the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.''That is really lovely,' my mom said. I liked that they liked each other. 'But isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.''True. Consciousness makes for poor windows, too. I don't think I'd ever thought about it quite that way."

"There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came. His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. "My name is Augustus Waters, he said. "I'm seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I'm just here today at Isaac's request."And how are you feeling? asked Patrick."Oh, I'm grand. Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. "I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend."

"That's part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence."

"I don't care if the New York Times writes an obituary for me. I just want you to write one. ... You say you're not special because the world doesn't know about you, but that's an insult to me. I know about you."

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

"But alas, the world is not a wish-granting factory."

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

"Why had Ovid lived in Ancient Rome in 20 BCE23 and not Chicago in 2006 CE? Would Ovid still have been Ovid if he had lived in America? No, he wouldn't have been, because he would have been a Native American or possibly an American Indian or a First Person or an Indigenous Person, and they did not have Latin or any other kind of written language then. So did Ovid matter because he was Ovid or because he lived in Ancient Rome?"

"He really was beautiful. I know boys aren't supposed to be, but he was."

"Weltschmerz. it's the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be."

"She's cute, I thought, but you don't need to like a girl who treats you like you're ten: You've already got a mom."

"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."

"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. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal."

"But I was not in the band, because I suffer from the kind of tone deafness that is generally associated with actual deafness."

"Just move to the Internet, its great here. We get to live inside where the weather is always awesome."

"The thing is that it could never again feel natural to talk to her."

"But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. - Hazel Grace Lancaster."

"It doesn't matter how long we've used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks-at least so far-are fairly limited in their awesomeness."

"But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future, and so they spent more time thinking about it. About the future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future..."

"Everyone wants to leave an extraordinary life."

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."

"You'll... you'll... live your best life today."

"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.' A brief awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed through: 'I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything."

"We need never to be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken."

"I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories-it will die with us,as it should."

"I didn't really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia."

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

"I always like routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring."

"Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying."

"No reason to be angry. Anger just distracts from the all-encompassing sadness."

"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."

"Nuts, arms, stomachs -- they never hurt. All hurt is brain hurt."

"How wil we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?"

"He was gone and 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."

"People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to."

"What are you assholes looking at?" "Nothing," said Radar. "We're certainly not looking at your eyebrows."

"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."

"You don't get to have an opinion on whether .999 is equal to 1, for instance. It is equal to 1. People smarter than us have worked hard to figure this stuff out, and we owe it to them and to the universe to respect what they've figured out."

"I was born into BolAvar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps."

"Patients are almost always preceded by their parents, because no matter how fast an ambulance can drive, terrified parents can drive faster."

"There is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars."

"Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of."

"All salvation is temporary, . . . I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing."

"One of the Great Rules of Economics According to John GreenIf you are rich, you have to be an idiot not to stay rich. And if you are poor, you have to be really smart to get rich."

"Thanks for not trying to see me when I looked like hell."To be fair, you still look pretty bad."

"Im in love with you and im not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things."

"It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing attainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who's kinda bossy, then I had to basically start liking a whole different person."