John Green

In the ensuing silence, I have time to contemplate the word cute— how dismissive it is, how it’s the equivalent of calling someone little, how it makes a person into a baby, how the word is a neon sign burning through the dark reading, “Feel Bad About Yourself.

... I didn't know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go.

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.

I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?

I pointed at the little kids goading each other to jump from rib cage to shoulder and Gus answered just loud enough for me to hear over the din, 'Last time, I imagined myself as the kid. This time, the skeleton.

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

And then we were kissing.....The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I rally like my body; this cancer-ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle.

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 was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.

... she called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy.

This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

It just goes to show, if you try to ruin someone's life, it only gets better. You just don't get to be a part of it.

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 feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you.

When people call people nerds, mostly what they're saying is, 'you like stuff.' Which is not a good insult at all, like, 'you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human conscience.

Everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.

My regret was immediate and permanent and useless.

I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well—but never quite perfectly, you know?

Maybe we're grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive.

We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors . . . But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.

Before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard.