Rabe’a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked...

So dawn goes down today… Nothing gold can stay.– Robert Frost

For so long, I hadn’t really heard Margo – I’d seen her screaming and thought her laughing – that now I figured it was my job. To try, even at this great remove, to hear...

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 love her. I am so lucky...

The end occurred mostly in her whispers and his silence – because he couldn’t whisper and they didn’t want to wake Colin’s parents. They succeeded in staying quiet, in part because it felt like the...

Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There...

What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand…. nor look through the eyes of the dead…. nor feed on the spectres in books. I tramp a perpetual journey All goes onward and...

There is not shortage of fault to be found amidst our stars.

Me pareció injusto que un idiota como Jason Worthington pudiera tener sexo con Margo y con Becca, cuando individuos perfectamente agradables como yo no tienen el privilegio de tener sexo con ninguna de las dos.....

There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.

Ultimately what I like about reading together is that we all make it happen together. Of course even amid shared experience we’re still alone… each reading of each book is unique. But what a comfort...

Physical intimacy isn’t and can never be an effective substitute for emotional intimacy.

Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.” That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a...

I know it doesn’t feel this way all the time, but we get to choose what we care about and what we spend our resources on. We choose what – or ideally whom – to...

I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.

Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business, after all. So I looked him over as Patrick acknowledged for the thousandth time...

Margo no era un milagro. Ella no era una aventura. No era una cosa bella y preciosa. Era una chica.

Creo que somos más grandes que la suma de nuestras partes.

And then it was the kind of dark your eyes never adjust to.

Siempre” era una promesa! ,Cómo puedes sólo romper una promesa?—A veces la gente no entiende las promesas que están haciendo cuando las están haciendo —dije. Isaac me lanzó una mirada—. Bien, por supuesto. Pero mantienes...

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.