What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They’re made of me as surely as my brain and my heart...

Peter Van Houten was the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’slike to be dying, and (b) not have died.

And, since they are theater people, they are all talking. All of them. Simultaneously. They do not need to be heard; they only need to be speaking.

Oh, Wikipedia, with your tension between those who would share knowledge and those who would destroy it.

As far as I can tell, there are two basic (kissing) rules: 1. Don’t bite anything without permission. 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it’s very powerful, and should be used sparingly.

Augustus,” I said. “Really. You don’t have to do this.””Sure I do,” he said. “I found my Wish.””God, you’re the best,” I told him.”I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your...

Angela, I really like you, but there’s something you need to know: when we go to my house and hook up, we’ll be watched by the twenty-four hundred eyes of twelve hundred black Santas.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we...

The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly...

Well,” Ben went on,”someone should just tell her to come on home, because she can find the world’s largest balls right here in Orlando, Florida. They’re located in a special display case known as ‘my...

Because you’re my friend, wingnut.

Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone.

People are supposed to care. It’s good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they’re gone.

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...

Kafir, you have a very complicated problem with a very simple solution.

There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed OK at the time because we...

She loves mysteries so much, she became one.

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

… 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.

I do my precalc homework, and then when I’m done I actually sit with the textbook for like three hours and try to understand what I just did. That’s the kind of weekend it is–the...

Didn’t feel too friendly,” Gus mumbled just loud enough for me to hear. When surprised and excited and innocent Gus emerged from Grand Gesture Metaphorically Inclined Augustus, I literally could not resist.

It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.

Thank you for letting me hijack your wish’, I said.’Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa,” he said.

You matter as much as the things that matter to you. And I got so backwards trying to matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who...

I spy with my little eye a great story.

Pain demands to be felt.

As a reader, I don’t feel a story has an obligation to make me happy. I want stories to show me a bigger world than the one I know.

But what could I lose by continuing that had not already been lost?

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.

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

(I didn’t tell him that thediagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true… Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making...

Headline?” he asked.”‘Swing Set Needs Home,'” I said.”‘Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,'” he said.”‘Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,'” I said.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

I believe in hope, in what is something called ”radical hope.” I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to...

…nós somos tão indestrutíveis como acreditamos ser.

I think about 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...

History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that they’re processes – that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in...

…the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn’t built for humans, we were built for the world. t

In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of the century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything–there’s no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite...

The champagne had been donated by one of Gus’s doctors – Gus being the kind of person who inspires doctors to give their best bottles of champagne to children.

At some point, you just pull off the band aid and it hurts. But when it is over, you are relieved.

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...

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...

As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist.

Always’ was a promise! How can you just break the promise?” “Sometimes people don’t always understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course. But you...

The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.

Maybe there’s 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.

Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner...