And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn’t planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together.

I am thinking that I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want to die. I don’t want my friends to die. And to be honest, as the time slows down and my hands are...

We think of infinity as a really big number, but it’s not. It’s endlessness. Endlessness is a really strange idea in a universe that is defined by its endings.

ya’ll smoke to enjoy, i smoke to die..

You don’t give a shit if people like you.

the world wasn’t made for us, we were made for the world

I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drawn.

I think if you went back to the eighteenth century and you asked a fifteen year old boy, ‘Would you like to marry a woman who has had plastic bags needlessly inserted into her breasts?’,...

We have to forgive to survive in this labyrinth [of suffering]

I felt the worry start to snatch at my breath when I finished talking.

Some people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.”Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.

Principled hate is a hell of a lot stronger than “Boy, I wish you hadn’t mummified me and thrown me into the lake” hate.

Imagine others complexly.

Colder by the hour, more dead with every breath.

You were with Margo Roth Spiegelman last night? At THREE A.M.? I nodded. Alone? I nodded. Oh my God, if you hooked up with her, you have to tell me every single thing that happened....

Love”I’m in love with you,” he said quietly.”Augustus,”I said.”I am,” he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not...

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

There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

(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.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about...

The Degree to which I am blessed staggers me… the degree to which I take that for granted shames me.-Streetwalking with Jesus

You get caught in being something, being cool or special or whatever, to the point where you don’t even know why you need it; you just think you do

I thought: We are not close enough. I though: He will not hear it. I thought: He will hear it and be out so fast that we will have no chance. I thought: Twenty seconds....

You don’t get to have an opinion on whether .999… is equal to 1, for instance. It is equal to 1. People smarter than us have worked hard to figure this stuff out, and we...

She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin’s so pale she looks like she’s just broken dawn.

He just waited until I stopped talking and said, ‘Jesus, kid, you’re almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what’s your theory?

Because it’s kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place where a paper creation became real....

What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.

What’s that?””The laundry basket?””No, next to it.””I don’t see anything next to it.””It’s my last shred of dignity. It’s very small.

I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were...

Augustus Waters was sitting on the front step as we pulled into the driveway. He was holding a bouquet of bright orange tulips just beginning to bloom.

Pero yo creo en el amor verdadero, ,sabes? No creo que todo el mundo se queda con los ojos o no enfermarse o lo que sea, pero todo el mundo debería tener al menos verdadero...

What a slut time is.She screws everybody.

I kind of conned you into believing you were falling in love with a healthy person.

But it’s not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.

… God we must look so lame, but it doesn’t much matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.

How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart’s bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all...

Because personally I think mattering is a piss-poor idea. I just want to fly under the radar, because when you start to make yourself into a big deal, that’s when you get shot down. The...

So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn’t over, and maybe he could...

There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our...

All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And...

He’d fought hard, Lida told me, as if there was another way to fight.

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.”[Thoughts from Places: The Tour, Nerdfighteria Wiki, January...

I think if you keep the box closed long enough you do kill the cat, actually. And-God, I hope you won’t take this personally-but I love my best friend more than anyone in the world.

People always get used to beauty, though. “I haven’t gotten used to you just yet,” he answered, smiling.

What can we do?” Mom asked again.I shrugged.But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came...

Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re going to do. I’m just going to do it.

That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he’d remember and look back on, one of those moments that he’d try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but...

She loved so much misteries tha she became one

Who am I to say that these things might nit be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary?