I worked hard to meet his eyes, even though they were the kind of pretty that’s hard to look at..

Mia,’ she whispered. I turned around. ‘What?’ I whispered back.She smiled at me a little. ‘LEEERRROOOY JEEENNKKIINNNSS!’ she shouted, then spun around and ran toward the Z’s in the lighting section.

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

Chuck Parson did not participate in organized sports, because to do so would distract from his larger goal of his life: to one day be convicted of murder

Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there’s a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people...

I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they were so blue. “There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are dead....

The problem with chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to the point where nothing is real.

Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is...

Lady and gentleman, when my parents left Korea with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the considerable wealth they had amassed in the shipping business, they had a dream. They had a dream...

A poem can’t do its work if you only read snippets of it.

Imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it’s impossible to tell because I’m underwater. But he wasn’t...

I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I...

If people were rain i was drizzle and she was a hurrican.

You could hold me and I could hold you. And it would be so peaceful. Completely peaceful. Like the feeling of sleep, but awake in it together.

Ergo: girls should always make the first move, because (a) they are, on the whole, less likely to be rejected than guys, (b) that way, girls will never get kissed unless they want to be...

It occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because the is always the thought that everything might be done better and again

I don’t really understand the point of crying. Also, I feel that crying is almost – like, aside from deaths of relatives or whatever – totally avoidable if you follow two very simple rules: 1....

Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell...

That’s why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates a adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you...

A day after I got my eye cut out, Gus showed up at the hospital. I was blind and heart-broken and didn’t want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, ‘I...

That poem is so damned long. You’d think old Walt could have taken a line or two to tell us how to unscrew the door from its jamb.

I would argue that stupidity is born out of bad reading, bad teaching and bad thinking!

Hazel, do you enjoy it?’ I paused a second, trying to figure out if my response should be calibrated to please Augustus or his parents. ‘Most of the people are really nice,’ I finally said.

Cousin-screwing. It is not totally safe. It raises the risk of birth defects slightly. But I was reading in a book for history that there’s, like, a 99.9999 percent chance that at least one of...

Patients are almost always preceded by their parents, because no matter how fast an ambulance can drive, terrified parents can drive faster.

Ich hasste Sport. Ich hasste Sport, und ich hasste Sportler, und ich hasste Leute, die sich Sport ansahen, und ich hasste Leute, die Leute, die sich Sport ansahen, nicht hassten.

Because you simply cannot draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.

I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period....

If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either...

I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories-it will die with us,as it should.

It’s not because I want to make out with her.”Hold on.” He grabbed a pencil and scrawled excitedly at the paper as if he’d just made a mathematical breakthrough and then looked back up at...

Seriously, don’t even get me started on my hot bod. You don’t want to see me naked, Dave. Seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace’s breath away,” he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational...

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

It lit up like a Christmas Tree Hazel Grace…

Well, I’m a fair kisser.

It’s hard to believe in coincidence, but it’s even harder to believe in anything else.

She laughed. ”You seem pretty normal.””You’ve never seen Ben snort Sprite up his nose and then spit it out of his mouth,” I said.”I look like a demented carbonated fountain,” he deadpanned.

We left. We did not say: Don’t drive, You’re drunk. We did not say: We aren’t letting you in that car when you are upset. We did not say: We insist on going with you....

what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us- not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us as individuals.

It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in...

What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?

I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that...

She loved mysteries so much, that she became one.

I want more numbers that I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I can not tell you thankful I am for our...

For the first time in a long time, I drive with no music. I’m not happy-not happy about Jane and Mr. Randall Water Polo Doucheface IV, not happy about Tiny abandoning me without so much...

I just want to stay away from people and read books.