John Green

“People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember.”

“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”

“Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it. And I had thought the thought.”

“I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.”

“I lay down and started to feel a little depressed about prom. I refused to feel any kind of sadness over the fact that I wasn't going to prom, but I had - stupidly, embarrassingly - thought of finding Margo, and getting her to come home with me just in time for prom, like late on Saturday night, and we'd walk into the Hilton ballroom wearing jeans and ratty T-shirts, and we'd be just in time for the last dance, and we'd dance while everyone pointed at us and marveled at the return of Margo, and then we'd fox-trot the hell out of there and go get ice cream at Friendly's. So yes, like Ben, I harbored ridiculous prom fantasies. But at least I didn't say mine out loud.”

“I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.”

“It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing unattainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness wh's kind of bossy--then I had to basically start liking a whole different person.”

“When you're writing a novel, you spend four years sitting in your basement and a year waiting for the book to come out and then you get the feedback. When you do work online, the moment you're finished making it, people start responding to it which is really fun and allows for a kind of community development you just can't have in novels.”

“You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.”

“Apparently, the world is not a wish-granting factory.”

“She's cute, I thought, but you don't need to like a girl who treats you like you're ten: You've already got a mom.”

“Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“There is not shortage of fault to be found amidst our stars.”

“I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What.”

“Because you’re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.' A brief awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed through: 'I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything.”

“War didn't scare me. I just didn't want to go all the way-hell over there to fight one. I had a reputation after that--I pretended I shot myself by accident, but everyone knew. I never did lose that reputation, but now most everyone is dead, and y'all ain't got any stories from them, so you have to believe mine by default: They were cowards, too. Everyone is.”

“Every year, many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you.”

“But of course, the universe does not conspire to put you in one place rather than another.”

“You can't just make me different and then leave”

“I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.”