John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

"If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything."

"The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness:'I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it."

"But I believe in true love, you know? I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does."

"What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."

"And then the line was quite but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone."

"Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you."

"Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of."

"But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves."

"Headline?"he asked."'Swing Set Needs Home,'"I said."'Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,'"he said."'Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,'"I said."

"You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect."

"Sometimes people don’t understandthe promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course.But you keep the promise anyway. That’swhat love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?"

"Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin."

"Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."

"Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate."

"Maybe 'Okay' will be our 'always'..."

"You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect."

"Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal"

"I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed."

"We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?"

"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."