You have no idea who I am. If you did, you could never love me.”
“No. I know exactly who you are.”
“I have evil inside of me.”
“Maybe you do. Maybe that is a part of you. That is all that it is. It is just a part. A part. It is not all of you. And that is what I love. Is all of you.

There’s a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people will have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.

It occurs to me, then, that people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible to even imagine.

Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course. Piracy, for example, is a tradition that has been carried on for hundreds of years, but that doesn’t mean we should all attack ships and steal their gold.

I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Me too,” he said.
“I don’t ever want to do that to you,” I told him.
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.

If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit. This is the way the world is made now.

One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you’re an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you’re lost in the wilderness. And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That’s when you realize that most of it - life, the relentless mechanism of existing - isn’t about you. It doesn’t include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you’ve jumped the edge. Even after you’re dead.

Making music on an instrument like this feels like being with a boy who’s so hot, you have to kiss him everywhere, all at once.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn’t have something in the first place. I guess that’s what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.

For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds.

Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.

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 or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this” —I gestured encompassingly—“will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was a time before organisms experiences consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.

Comparison is the thief of joy.