John Green

For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

Even with everything broken and decided inside her she couldn't quite allow herself to disappear for good.

She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.

In the contemporary world where things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold, you have to imagine a community where there is no centre. Hank, at the end of this year I started thinking that a lot of life is about doing things that don’t suck with people who don’t suck.

Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.

it was not enough to be the last guy she kissed. i wanted to be the last one she loved.

Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? But I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself—if they could live in my memories—would anyone, anyone, love me?

Nerd girls are the world’s most underutilized romantic resource. And guys, do not tell me that nerd girls are not hot because that shows a Paris Hilton-esque failure to understand hotness.

I think about how much depends upon a best friend. Then 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.

And I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart slowly, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and nothing but herself and her mom in those last moments as she spent as a person.

That doesn't sound like my Margo", she said, and I thought of my Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different funhouse mirrors.

I was thinking about this girl you love so much," she said, "And this place I love so much. And how that happens. How you can just fall into it.

And then I was asleep. That deep, can-still-taste-her-in-my-mouth sleep, that sleep that is not particularly restful but difficult to wake up from all the same.

They belong to their readers now, which is a great thing–because the books are more powerful in the hands of my readers than they could ever be in my hands.

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.

And I vaguely remember her smiling at me from the door way the glittering ambiguity of a girls smile, which seems to promise an answer to the question, but never gives it. The question, the one we’ve all been asking since girls stopped being gross, the question that is to simple to be uncomplicated: Does she like me or does she LIKE me?

I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.

Maybe there is something you're afraid to say, or someone you're afraid to love, or somewhere you're afraid to go. It's gonna hurt. It's gonna hurt because it matters.

I have spent my life falling. Not the kind that Tiny's talking about. He's talking about love. I'm talking about life. In my kind of falling, there's no landing. There's only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you're falling, it's the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.

This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.

So keeping the box closed just keeps you in the dark, not the universe.