“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
“My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.”
“That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It demands to be felt.”
“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
“Thomas Edison’s last words were ‘It’s very beautiful over there’. I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.”
“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
“You can love someone so much…But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”
“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 the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and 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 rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”
“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting.”
“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
“What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?”
“That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.”
“It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”
“You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.”
“Some people have lives; some people have music.”
“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.”
“Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence”
“But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”
“I feel like my life is so scattered right now. Like it’s all the small pieces of paper and someone’s turned on the fan. But, talking to you makes me feel like the fan’s been turned off for a little bit. Like things could actually make sense. You completely unscatter me, and I appreciate that so much.”
“We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken.”
“Everything that comes together falls apart. When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you stopped suffering when they did.”
“Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon.”
“Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.”
“But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.”
“You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.”
“I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.”
“I don’t think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.”
“We have this weird thing in the world where you don’t get insulted for what you do, you get insulted for who you are.”
“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 a life or a death that means anything.”
“Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s right. Things couldn’t be righter. Things could be less tired. They could be less busy. They could be less caffeinated. But they couldn’t be righter. ”
“The pleasure isn’t in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it.”
“Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.”
“We all use the future to escape the present.”
“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 are all going.”
“I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.”
“Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.”
“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 care about me, and this place. It’s so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don’t even know why you need it; you just think you do.”
“Truth resists simplicity.”
“I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.”
“We are greater than the sum of our parts.”
“I’d rather wonder than get answers I couldn’t live with.”
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