What I eventually realized is that the real business of books is not done by awards committees or people who turn trees into paper or editors or agents or even writers. We’re all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers.
We’re all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers.
You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet.
We’re invisible. I’ve never been here with someone else. It’s different being invisible with someone.
Breaking up isn’t something that gets done to you; its something that happens with you.
I smiled. She smiled. I believed the smile.
You had been a paper boy to me all these years – two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real.
For me, the hero’s journey is not the voyage from weakness to strength. The true hero’s journey is the voyage from strength to weakness.
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.