"Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one."

"I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what s cool."

"You get caught in being something, being cool or special or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do."

"Who am I to say that these things might nit be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary?"

"This was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories. I only listened - the stories on my mind weren't that funny."

"As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist."

"It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she'd left for me."

"Not to sound like a jerk, but Jane isn't really my type. Her hair's kinda disastrously curly and she mostly hangs out with guys. My type's a little girlier. And 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."

"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape 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."

"Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I'm sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I'm gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you're gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you-they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn't prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart."

"Like, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have no idea whether we're actually motivated by altruism or a desire to hook up or a search for answers or what. I always get annoyed when in books or movies characters want clear things for clear reasons, because my experience of humanness is that I always want messy things for messy reasons."

"Colin "I'm just--I'm just a failure. what if this is it? -----andI never do anything significant and I'm just a complete waste?"Hassan sat up, with his hands on his knees. "See, this is why you need to believe in God."

"It occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because the is always the thought that everything might be done better and again."

"It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities."

"I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and toward the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go, too! I want to go, too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going."

"The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence."

"At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze."

"You get all these friends when just when you don't need friends anymore."

"The existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate."

"Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future."

"I hate that. I hate kids like that so fugging much."

"I feel like how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do."

"You and I are just kids. We've got the best and the worst of it in front of us."

"Well, while you were in the bathroom, I sat down at this picnic table here in Bumblefug, Kentucky, and noticed that someone had carved that GOD HATES FAG, which, aside from being a grammatical nightmare, is absolutely ridiculous. So I'm changing it to 'God Hates Baguettes.' It's tough to disagree with that. Everybody hates baguettes."

"There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined."

"It's hard as hell to hold on to your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes, and that's what I was thinking about as we hunted for bad guys through the ruins of a city that didn't exist."

"Part of not being a self-centered asshole, Colin reasoned, is doing things with your friends even when you don't want to."

"Funerals, I had decided, are for the living."

"If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything."

"I worked hard to meet his eyes, even though they were the kind of pretty that's hard to look at.."

"Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God."

"Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about."

"It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating."

"The pleasure isn't in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it."

"Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children's librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I'll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid."

"You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting."

"She loved so much misteries tha she became one."

"It's like she thinks my job is to please her, and that should be my dearest wish, and when I don't please her - I get shut out."

"What you must understand about me is that I'm a deeply unhappy person."

"But mothers lie. It's in the job description."

"The champagne had been donated by one of Gus's doctors - Gus being the kind of person who inspires doctors to give their best bottles of champagne to children."

"Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. 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, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

"Anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see."

"I am trying to find ways to live honestly and hopefully in the world without ignoring or denying the universe s cold and painful indifference to us."

"She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me."

"He'd fought hard, Lida told me, as if there was another way to fight."

"Ben, if you get pee in my brand-new car, I am going to cut your balls off."Still peeing, Ben looks over at me smirking. "You re gonna need a hell of a big knife, bro."

"Do you know what your problem is? You can't live with the idea that someone might leave."

"I was blind and heart broken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, "I have wonderful news!" And I was like, "I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now," and Gus said, "This is wonderful news you want to hear," and I asked him, "Fine, what is it?" and he said, "You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!"

"I feel like I might start crying and that I'm going to cry pee."