“I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out my cannula so I could smell better, breathing him in and breathing him out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest burning until I could't distinguish among the pains.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“I thought of my dad telling me that the universe wants to be noticed. But 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.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“I told him that he was fearing something universal and inevitable, and how really, the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaningless of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him—that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her—green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs—would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process…”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“I felt the heaves of his chest as we realized over and over again that we were still alive. I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, 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.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“We are driving through the place that she could not drive through, passing onto asphalt she never saw, and we are not dead. We are not dead! We are breathing and we are crying and now slowing down and moving back into the right lane.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“Memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible for me.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left…”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com