John Green

Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seem running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God.

That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it.

Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington__ house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.

Things belong to the people that use them, not to the people who create them.

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it__ printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.

It doesn__ matter how long we__e used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks__t least so far__re fairly limited in their awesomeness.

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever pay attention to them and they always love you back.

Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children__ librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I__l get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid.

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.

I hadn__ 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.

Have you really read all those books in your room?__laska laughing- __h God no. I__e maybe read a third of __m. But I__ going to read them all. I call it my Life__ Library. Every summer since I was little, I__e gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.

Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

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

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.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I__ sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I__ gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you__e gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you__hey came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn__ prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they__l wait for you forever pay attention to them and they always love you back.