I could remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.
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.
I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re going to do. I’m just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.
Oh no you didn’t,” Radar says when I show him why we’re laughing. “Ben Starling, you better not have bought your token black friend a racist shirt.
It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.
I guess I had a hamartia after all.
I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.
When adults say, “teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are.
That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.
I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn’t sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it.
Without pain, How can we know joy?
It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.
People wanted security. They couldn’t bear the idea of death being a black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t imagine themselves not existing.
Damn it,” he sighed. “How will I ever get out of this Labyrinth!
That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It demands to be felt.
Okay,” he said after forever. “Maybe okay will be our always.” “Okay,” I said.
I couldn’t unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn’t want to.
So dawn goes down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay.
Nostalgia is a side effect of dying.
Dad always told me that you can judge people by the way they treat waiters and assistants. By this measure, Peter Van Houten was possibly the world’s douchiest douche.