"So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be seen. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved."

"Losing you're co-remember meant losing the memory itself."

"You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect."

"No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around."

"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."

"I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred 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."

"Oh, Wikipedia, with your tension between those who would share knowledge and those who would destroy it."

"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."

"You don't get to chose 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."

"The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all."

"As he read, I feel in love the way you fall asleep: slow, and then all at once."

"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 with a predetermined winner."

"What we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us- not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us as individuals."

"I just want to domething that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter."

"The thing about dead people... The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them, but the truth is... complicated, I guess."

"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."

"Suffering can bend & break us. But it can also break us open to become the persons God intended us to be. It depends on what we do with the pain. If we offer it back to God, He will use it to do great things in us & through us, because suffering is fertile... it an grow new life."

"She's adorable . "How would you know? "I'm gay, not blind. Her hair's all poofy and she's got a great nose. I mean, a great nose. And, what? What do you people like? Boobs? She seems to have boobs. They seem to be of approximately normal boob size. What else do you want?"

"I know what happens a the end of falling-landing."

"Most of my friends were in band, and most of my free time during school was spent within twenty feet of the band room."

"Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing."

"You are helpful, and you are loved, and you are forgiven, and you are not alone."

"Maybe I was supposed to hate Caroline Mathers or something because she'd been with Augustus, but I didn't. I couldn't see her very clearly amid all the tributes, but there didn't seem to be much to hate. She seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they'd have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I'd ever done was Have Cancer."

"Most parents don't know really their children."

"Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it. And I had thought the thought."

"It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you."

"This is why we call people exes, I guess - because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. it's too easy to see an X as a cross-out. it's not, because there's no way to cross out something like that. the X is a diagram of two paths."

"You can't know what an experience will mean to future-you until you are future-you. You need millions of seconds of perspective, which ultimately, only time can buy."

"I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side."

"If people were rain I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane."

"Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone's about to die."

"The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended only by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people."

"All writing is rewriting."

"Dear Teens at Starbucks wearing 'Abstain from Sex 2 Attain Ur Goals' t-shirts: Doesn't it depend on what my goals are?"

"You die in the middle of your life."

"I don't really understand the point of crying. Also, I feel that crying is almost - like, aside from deaths of relatives or whatever - totally avoidable if you follow two very simple rules: 1. Don't care too much. 2. Shut up. Everything unfortunate that has ever happened to me has stemmed from failure to follow one of the rules."

"The longer I do my job ... 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."

"We care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That's how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too."

"Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you."

"We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did."

"I thought: We are not close enough. I though: He will not hear it. I thought: He will hear it and be out so fast that we will have no chance. I thought: Twenty seconds. I was breathing hard and fast."

"I called Isaac, who cursed life and the universe and God Himself and who said where are the goddamned trophies to break when you need them, and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters's death was Augustus Waters."

"There are times when it is appropriate, even preferable, to get an erection when someone's face is in close proximity to your penis.This was not one of those times."

"What?" I asked."Nothing," he said."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."

"His problems are so huge that your problems can just hide behind them."

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

"If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be mt flowers."

"I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently then it would for him- that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter."

"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 OK 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."

"All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children."