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

"I think how much depends upon a best friend. When you wake up in the morning you swing your legs out of bed and you put your feet on the ground and you stand up. You don't scoot to the edge of the bed and look down to make sure the floor is there. The floor is always there. Until it's not."

"I came to the conclusion a while ago that there is nothing romantic or supernatural about loving someone: Love is the privilege of being responsible for another. It was, for a time, what kept me going: Each morning, for a little while, I got to feel the weight of the yoke on my back as I pulled the ancient cart of my species."

"If my public existence does anything worthwhile, hopefully it at least demystifies the author a bit, because I know when I was younger I felt like authors were like wizards or something. Turns out they're total muggles."

"Her primary reason for living and my primary reason for living were awfully entangled."

"Hey, it's Col. I'm standing in a soybean field outside of Gutshot, Tennessee, which is a long story, and it's hot. K. I'm standing here sweating like I had hyperhidrosis, that disease where you sweat a lot. Crap. That's not interesting. But anyway, it's hot, and so I'm thinking about cold to stay cool. And I was remembering walking through the snow coming back from the ridiculous movie. Do you remember that, K? We were on Giddings, and the snow made it so quiet, I couldn't hear a thing in the world but you. And it was so cold then, and so silent, and I loved you so much. Now it's hot, and dead quiet again, and I love you still."

"That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt..."

"Night falls fast. Today is in the past."

"It is so hard to leave-until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world."

"I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years."

"Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate."

"The whole thing was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic."

"Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It's disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven't let it succeed prematurely."

"He is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with. i have to believe that's a sign."

"That didn't happen, of course. Things never happenedlike I imagined them."

"And we'll call you...hmmm. Pudge.""Huh?""Pudge," the Colonel said. "Because you're skinny. It's called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now, let's go get some cigarettes and start this year off right."

"When I was little, my dad used to tell me, "Will, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends nose."

"We got off at the next exit, quietly, and, switching drivers, we walked in front of the car. We met and I held him, my hands balled into tight fists around his shoulders, and he wrapped his short arms around me and squeezed tight, so that I felt the heaves of his chest as we realized over and over again that we were still alive. I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, 'God we must look so lame,' but it doesn't matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive."

"I missed the future."

"When things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It's because a little piece gets lost - the two remaining ends couldn't fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed."

"And the moral of the story is that you don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened."

"We fatties have a bond, dude. It's like a secret society. We got all kinds of shit you don't know about. Handshakes, special fat people dances-we got these secret fugging lairs in the center of the earth and we go down there in the middle of the night when all the skinny kids are sleeping and eat cake and friend chicken and shit. Why d'you think Hollis is still sleeping, kafir? Because we were up all night in the secret lair injecting butter frosting into our veins. ...A fatty trusts another fatty."

"We don't get to choose if we get hurt in this world, old man, but we do have a say in who hurts us. I know I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.I do, Augustus. I do."

"Maybe Harry Potter is real and you're not."

"Sametimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them."

"And on some level it walways felt like kids paying at being grown."

"The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath."

"You can love someone so much. But you can never love someone as much as you miss them."

"Imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."

"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."

"You had been a paper boy to me all these years - two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real."

"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."

"I felt the worry start to snatch at my breath when I finished talking."

"A poem can't do its work if you only read snippets of it."

"I would not be dying if it were not for her. I would have stayed home, as I have always stayed home, and I would have been safe, and I would have done the one thing I have always wanted to do, which is to grow up."

"Everything's uglier up close.Not you."

"Daddy is trying really fugging hard to think of a not-terrifying reason why you'd wake Daddy up in the middle of the night to ask that fugging question. But no. No. Daddy does not have a match or a lighter."

"I couldn't help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them-it was a kind of sad I didn't mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way."

"If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

"Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will. But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

"Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust."

"Which got me to wondering whether it's possible to learn how to be a person in a world where all the people are dead."

"I'm a grenade, I just want to stay away from people and read books, and think..."

"A nonhot boy stares at you and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy...well."

"I've never known before what it feels like to want someone - not to want to hook up with them or whatever, but to want them, to want them. And now I do. So maybe I do believe in epiphanies."

"We have to forgive to survive in this labyrinth [of suffering]."

"We are taught that the hero's journey is the journey from weakness to strength. But I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero's journey is the journey from strength to weakness."

"I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don't fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don't want to see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big...mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky."

"What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a very playful way of acknowledging that and acknowledging that and that always, whenever we play, whenever we live, we are living in both literal and metaphorical ways on the memory and bones of the dead."

"The problem, of course, is that there's no way of knowing that your last good day is your Last Good Day. At the time, it's just another good day."