John Green

you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends nose.

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends nose.

Part of not being a self-centered asshole, Colin reasoned, is doing things with your friends even when you don't want to.

This was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories. I only listened - the stories on my mind weren't that funny.

...being in a bad mood with your friends beats being in a bad mood without them.

But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all. Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo's anger at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in.

I lay down and started to feel a little depressed about prom. I refused to feel any kind of sadness over the fact that I wasn't going to prom, but I had - stupidly, embarrassingly - thought of finding Margo, and getting her to come home with me just in time for prom, like late on Saturday night, and we'd walk into the Hilton ballroom wearing jeans and ratty T-shirts, and we'd be just in time for the last dance, and we'd dance while everyone pointed at us and marveled at the return of Margo, and then we'd fox-trot the hell out of there and go get ice cream at Friendly's. So yes, like Ben, I harbored ridiculous prom fantasies. But at least I didn't say mine out loud.

People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember.

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will. But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all

Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning she haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

The silence broke:"Sometimes I liked it", I said "Sometimes I liked it that she was dead.""You mean it felt good?""No. I don't know. It felt ... pure.

No reason to be angry. Anger just distracts from the all-encompassing sadness.

What you must understand about me is that I__ a deeply unhappy person.

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says.The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.

I think how much depends upon a best friend. When you wake up in the morning you swing your legs out of bed and you put your feet on the ground and you stand up. You don't scoot to the edge of the bed and look down to make sure the floor is there. The floor is always there. Until it's not.

I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What.

(...) and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water's death was Augustus Water.

Grief does not change you. It reveals you.