Be present in this class. And then, when it’s over, be present out there.

I just want to be enough for you, but I never can be. This can never be enough for you. But this is all you get. You get me, and your family, and this world....

The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed.

I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn’t hate people who watched or played them.

I don’t know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.

It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations.

The funny thing about writing is that whether you’re doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That’s actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.

I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I’d never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see...

That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt…

I just want to domething that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.

You smoke to enjoy it i smoke to die

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid...

My brain is on fire!” to try to help these people understand that this is a headache that needs attention! That’s a metaphor, right? And you use it so that you can be understood. Now...

That deep, can-still-taste-her-in-my-mouth sleep.

What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I...

It doesn’t matter how long we’ve used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks—at least so far—are fairly limited...

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...

You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.

You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.

As the tide washed in, the Dutch Tulip Man faced the Ocean:”Conjoiner rejoinder poisoner concealer revelator. Look at it, rising up and rising down, taking everything with it.””What’s that?” Anna asked.”Water,” the Dutchman said. “Well,...

I’m just very, very fond of you.

No you don’t”, she answers, and she is right. She can see it in my face- I understand now that I can’t be her and she can’t be me. Maybe Whitman had a gift I...

Even though I was in bed and he was in his basement, it really felt like we were back in that uncreated third space, which was a place I really liked visiting with him.

…and on that thin-mooned night, I could see little more than her silhoutte except for when she smoked, the burning cherry of the cigarette washing her face in pale red light.

I don’t think you’re dying,” I said. “I think you’ve just got a touch of cancer.He smiled. Gallows humor.

In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business—and I wanted to try to reflect that.

I don’t suppose I can wear the flamingo tie,” he said as he pulled on black socks. “It’s a bit festive, given the occasion,” I responded. “Can’t wear it to the opera,” said the Colonel,...

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

You put the thing that does the killing between your teeth, but you never give it the power to kill you

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...

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...

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

She cannot possibly be dead, people do not just die

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...

I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.

I bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be...

Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep....

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.

Such was life that morning: nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.” (pg. 18)

I don’t care if the New York Times writes an obituary for me. I just want you to write one. … You say you’re not special because the world doesn’t know about you, but that’s...

…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. It’s the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and...

We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on...

If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all

All right. The snow may be falling in the winter of my discontent, but at least I’ve got sarcastic company.

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

Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won’t be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at...

I am in the midst of a soliloquy! I wrote this out and memorized it and if you interrupt me I will completely screw it up,’ Augustus interrupted. ‘Please to be eating your sandwich and...

I have an Augustus Waters fetish,” I explained.