“It was an amazing sight, that splendor alongside death. I felt something like the surge hit me, a wave of sorrow followed by an even bigger wave of exhilaration and gratitude. I felt alive in a way I hadn’t in years.”— Mary Taugher, narrativemagazine.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
“He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish life. The rest was darkness. 'Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!'”— John Green, The General In His Labyrinth, amazon.com
“That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.”— 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
“That's the mystery, isn't it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape--the world or the end of it?”— John Green, Alaska Young, 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
“I would never know her well enough to know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if she left us on purpose. But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go…”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice ta…”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com