You can’t just make me different and then leave. You can’t. You can’t change me and make my whole life centered around you, then leave.
We have to live with ambiguity. We have to give ourselves over to it. The question is: How? How are we going to live in a universe where important questions will always go unanswered?
When it works, anticipation is far more fulfilling than surprise, because we are reminded that a sunrise is precisely as magnificent as it is inevitable.
Like everyone, I’m saddened and horrified by this. All I’ll say is that I’m personally trying to pay more attention to the victims than to their murderer. I certainly will not be mentioning the murderer. I don’t think he warrants our attention-particularly since he so clearly wanted it.
Frankly, I kind of want you to be haunted by the unansweredness of the question, because I think being haunted by such things is a valuable part of being a person.
You don’t want romantic advice from me, you want romantic advice from Edward Cullen. I completely understand but he is completely unavailable right now and I’ll tell you why. He doesn’t exist.
According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor till the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul.
Books are seldom useful unless they are also beautiful.
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.
It looked like an old painting, but real – everything achingly idyllic in the morning light – and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.
It was kind of a beautiful day, finally real summer in Indianapolis, warm and humid – the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn’t built for humans, we were built for the world.
Here’s my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I’ve ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.
The truth hurts because it’s real. It hurts because it mattered. And that’s an important thing to acknowledge to yourself.
A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer.
I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself to train my body for real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.
The future will erase everything – there’s no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.
Sunlight feels warm and rough against your skin like a kiss on the cheek from your dad.
You could hold me and I could hold you. And it would be so peaceful. Completely peaceful. Like the feeling of sleep, but awake in it together.
I hadn’t read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.