It is a good life, Hazel Grace.
That is, to me at least, one of the most helpful and useful things books do for us: They are generous enough to allow us to choose what matters to us.
We’re professional worriers. You’re constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them.
Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I’m writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.
Does my eye look okay to you?
That’s the thing about pain, it demands to be felt.
Grateful to be a little boat, full of water, still floating.
I was a fairly shy person – not the hand raising type.
All the things paper-thin and paper-frail, and all the people too.
You were clearly not doing your part in the clover search, perv.
I am a giant squid of anger.
It turns out that, somehow, there are a tremendous number of things to be optimistic about.
I liked Augustus Waters. I really, really really liked him. I liked the way his story ended with someone else. I liked his voice. I liked that he took existentially-fraught free throws.
I didn’t even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it.
And as we kept driving north, the whole family in the care together, it got darker, and snowier, until finally the road delivered us to the one place that all my youthful trips west never could: home.
It is not my fault that my parents own the world’s largest collection of black Santas.
Nothing has ever looked like that ever in all of human history.
You will go to the paper towns and never come back.
This star won’t go out. And it won’t. we won’t let it.
Don’t swear in the Literal Heart of Jesus.