“The grief. It came crashing in like a tidal wave. The very thought of it still sends a shiver down my spine: makes me wince a little. The weight of it. Those vacant, anguished expressions, and the way we nestled into each other, softly, and the endless cups of too-strong tea that were made by distra…”— Kathy Brown, thoughtcatalog.com
“Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That's what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.”— John Green, Augustus Waters, amazon.com
“All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn't get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn't gotten to be a per…”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“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
“What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me.”— John Green, Augustus Waters, amazon.com
“I like this world. I like drinking champagne. I like not smoking. I like the sound of Dutch people speaking Dutch. And now...I don't even get a battle. I don't get a fight.”— John Green, Augustus Waters, amazon.com
“I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls. The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won't be able to give anything in exchange for my life.”— John Green, Augustus Waters, amazon.com
“That's God, I think, the rising sun, and the light is too bright and her eyes are losing but they aren't lost. I don't believe we return to haunt or comfort the living or anything, but I think something becomes of us.”— John Green, Augustus Waters, amazon.com
“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
“Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me.”— John Green, Chip, 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
“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
“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.”— John Green, Chip, 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