John Green

He just waited until I stopped talking and said, 'Jesus, kid, you're almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what's your theory?

When you date someone, you have the markers along the way, right: You kiss, you have The Talk, you say the Three Little Words, you sit on a swing set and break up. You can plot the points on a graph. And you check up with each other along the way: Can I do this? If I say this, will you say it back?"But with friendship, there's nothing like that. Being in a relationship, that's something you choose. Being friends, that's just something you are.

... going out late at night and laying in the dewy field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight.

Later, I walked towards the dorm circle beside Alaska. The cicadas hummed their one-note song, just as they had at home in Florida. She turned to me as we made our way through the darkness and said,"When you__e walking at night, do you ever get creeped out and even though it__ silly and embarrassing you just want to run home?__t seemed too secret and personal to admit to a virtual stranger but I told her, __eah, totally.__or a moment, she was quiet. Then she grabbed my hand, whispered,__un run run run run,_ and took off, pulling me behind her.

One of the Great Rules of Economics According to John GreenIf you are rich, you have to be an idiot not to stay rich. And if you are poor, you have to be really smart to get rich.

I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they were so blue. "There will come a time," I said, "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 for that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you.

I realized that all my life, my values were based upon typical middle-class American values: hard work, doing good, living well, owning things, following the rules & being the best I can be... but God clearly says, "those are not MY values. I value justice, mercy & humility.

All of us, poor & rich alike, have been conditioned by our upbringings. Impoverished men & women may become lulled into a state of "learned helplessness" without hope to change their lives. Likewise, the wealthy can walk in a state of "learned blindness" ignoring the desperation of the local & global poor.

Be present in this class. And then, when it's over, be present out there.

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.

I couldn__ help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them__t was a kind of sad I didn__ mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what´s cool.

I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what´s cool".

Pudge/Colonel: "I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I guess. And I had this secret. You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide. She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something. She walked away, and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking. So I let her go too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to." Takumi

...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.

The longer I do my job ... the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.

Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.

Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you," and the Colonel whispered, "I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did," and I said, "No. Not past tense." She wasn't even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense.