Whenever I’m asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing,...

And we’ll call you…hmmm. Pudge.””Huh?””Pudge,” the Colonel said. “Because you’re skinny. It’s called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now, let’s go get some cigarettes and start this year off right.

Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.

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

Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher’s last words were “Now comes the mystery.” The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do...

There are times when it is appropriate, even preferable, to get an erection when someone’s face is in close proximity to your penis.This was not one of those times.

Why is being a nerd bad? Saying I notice you’re a nerd is like saying, ‘Hey, I notice that you’d rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you’d rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that...

War didn’t scare me. I just didn’t want to go all the way-hell over there to fight one. I had a reputation after that–I pretended I shot myself by accident, but everyone knew. I never...

Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside...

The marks we leave are too often scars.

i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time.

I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed...

Sometimes I dream that I’m writing a memoir. A memoir would just be the thing to keep me in the hearts and memories of my adoring public.

…it argues that true love will triumph in the end (which may or may not be true) but if it’s a lie, it’s the most beautiful lie we have!

You don’t get to chose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.

Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is actually used to cut diamonds,” I added. Radar tapped a locker twice with his fist to show his approval, and...

All of us, poor & rich alike, have been conditioned by our upbringings. Impoverished men & women may become lulled into a state of “learned helplessness” without hope to change their lives. Likewise, the wealthy...

I am in love with you, and I am not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.

When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window...

All salvation is temporary,” Augustus shot back. “I bought them a minute. Maybe that’s the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one’s gonna buy them...

After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out – but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.” Chip/Colonel

Physical space between us evaporates. We play the broken strings of our instruments one last time

…iubirea mea, nu-ți pot spune c t de recunoscătoare sunt pentru mica noastră infinitate. N-aș schimba-o pentru nimic în lume. Tu mi-ai oferit o veșnicie în interiorul zilelor numărate și pentru asta îți sunt recunoscătoare.

I had not cried for Margo until then, but now finally I did, pounding against the ground and shouting because there was no on to hear: I missed her I missed her I missed her...

I’ll give you my strength if I can have your remission.

it’s not my fault my parents own the world’s largest collection of black santas

Honestly, I don’t even like my type of girl that much, let alone other types. Not that I’m asexual or something – I just find Romance Drama unbearable.

More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someonewho might have loved you back but can’t due to deadness, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back...

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or...

I’ll fight it. I’ll fight it for you. Don’t you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I’m okay. I’ll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time.

He specialized in the murder of dreams, Hazel Grace…

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (…) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that...

What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the...

No headboards were broken.

Being in a relationship, that’s something you choose. Being friends, that’s just something you are. [But] I do pick you. We’ve been friends too long to pick, but if we could pick, I’d pick you.

Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.

If people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricaine

Human existence is temporary and all the knowledge of the universe we acquire will in time be forgotten because there will be no humans left to benefit from any of the stuff we learned.And yet,...

This was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories. I only listened – the stories on my mind weren’t that funny.

Dumpers are not inherently worse than Dumpees-breaking up isn’t something that gets done to you; it’s something that happens with you.

Nothing’s wrong. 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.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me will full hands; How could I answer the child?……I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be...

I did some research on this a couple years ago,” Augustus continued. “I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living...

Where do you come up with these zingers, Clint? Do you own some kind of joke factory in Indonesia where you’ve got eight-year-olds working ninety hours a week to deliver you that kind of top-quality...

I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointments in the Department of Having a Voice that Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin.

May I see you again?” he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in his voice. I smiled. “Sure.””Tomorrow?” he asked.”Patience, grasshopper,” I counseled. “You don’t want to seem overeager. “Right, that’s why I said tomorrow,”...

It’s hard as hell to hold on to your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes

I fell in love like you would fall asleep: slowly and then all at once.

Idiotically, it occurred to me that my pink underwear didn’t match my purple bra, as if boys even notice such things.

The problem, of course, is that there’s no way of knowing that your last good day is your Last Good Day. At the time, it’s just another good day.