Daily Digest

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.”

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”

“My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.”

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”

“Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”

“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”

“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”

“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 a hurricane.”

“You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”

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

“It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.”

“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.”

“You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”

“Some people have lives; some people have music.”

“When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.”

“I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.”

“Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should've gotten more.' 'Seventeen,' Gus corrected. 'I'm assuming you've got some time, you interupting bastard. 'I'm telling you,' Isaac continued, 'Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interupt you at his own funeral. And he was pretentious: Sweet Jesus Christ, that kid never took a piss without pondering the abundant metaphorical resonances of human waste production. And he was vain: I do not believe I have ever met a more physically attractive person who was more acutely aware of his own physical attractiveness. 'But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him.' I was kind of crying by then.”

“I may die young, but at least I'll die smart.”

“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”

“Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”

“If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal”

“Have you really read all those books in your room?” Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.”

“What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.”

“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.”

“They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting.”

“You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”

“The town was paper, but the memories were not.”

“Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always”

“If you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain.”

“I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”

“That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.”

“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”

“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?”

“What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war”