John Green

This is your war now.' I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?'Some war,' he said dismissively. 'What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Graze, with a predetermined winner.

I would not be dying if it were not for her. I would have stayed home, as I have always stayed home, and I would have been safe, and I would have done the one thing I have always wanted to do, which is to grow up.

Peter Van Houten was the only person I__ ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it__like to be dying, and (b) not have died.

Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart__ bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r__ and g__ in a way I__ never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I__ never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can__ make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn__ see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

I don't think you're dying," I said. "I think you've just got a touch of cancer.He smiled. Gallows humor.

We just did an awesome job of not dying.

You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

And we'll call you...hmmm. Pudge.""Huh?""Pudge," the Colonel said. "Because you're skinny. It's called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now, let's go get some cigarettes and start this year off right.

And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.

How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" to a margin note written in her loop-heavy cursive: Straight & Fast.

She has great breasts," the Colonel said without looking up from the whale."DO NOT OBJECTIFY WOMEN'S BODIES!" Alaska shouted.Now he looked up. "Sorry. Perky breasts.""That's not any better!

You can__ burn down a made-up place.

We were just standing there, and her eyes were so interesting. Not in the usual way of being interesting, like being extremely blue or extremely big or flanked by obscenely long lashes or anything.

I worked hard to meet his eyes, even though they were the kind of pretty that__ hard to look at..

But I believe in true love, you know? Idon__ 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.

If people were rain I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane.

Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.