John Green

We have this weird thing in the world where you don't get insulted for what you do, you get insulted for who you are.

That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.

I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life.

The Venn Diagram of boys who don’t like smart girls and boys you don’t wanna date is a circle.

It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.

I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.

If you don't say the honest thing, it never becomes true.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

The pure and simple truth Is rarely pure and never simple. What's a boy to do When lies and truth are both sinful?

It's like people believe all you need to do is like the same bands in order to be soulmates. Or book. Oh my god...you like The Outsiders too...it's like we're the same person! No, we're not. It's like we have the same English teacher. There's a difference.

When it comes to girls (and in Colin's case, it so often did), everyone has a type. Colin Singleton's type was not physical but linguistic: he liked Katherines. And not Katies or Kats or Kitties or Cathys or Rynns or Trinas or Kays or Kates or, god forbid, Catherines. K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E. He had dated 19 girls. All of them had been named Katherine. And all of them- every single solitary one- had dumped him.

Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.

Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.

High school is neither a democracy nor a dictatorship - nor, contrary to popular belief, an anarchic state. High school is a divine-right monarchy. And when the queen goes on vacation, things change.

My head was level with hers as we stared at each other from opposite sides of the glass. I don't remember how it ended - if I went to bed or she did. In my memory, it doesn't end. We just stay there, looking at each other, forever.

How do you just stop being terrified of getting left behind and ending up by yourself forever and not meaning anything to the world?

It was nice - in the dark and the quiet... and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing.

Reading it the night before, I'd wondered if it would be like that for me-if in one moment, I would finally understand her, know her, and understand the role I'd played in her dying. But I wasn't convinced enlightenment struck like lightining.

So she became impulsive, scared by her inaction into perpetual action. When the Eagle confronted her with the expulsion, maybe she blurted out Marya's name because it was the first that came to mind, because in that moment she didn't want to get expelled and she couldn't think past that moment. She was scared, sure. But more importantly, maybe she'd been scared of being paralyzed by fear again. ~Miles/Pudge on Alaska, pg 120-121

That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.

For she had embodied the Great Perhaps--she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps.