There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came. His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. “My name is Augustus Waters,” he said. “I’m seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I’m just here today at Isaac’s request.” “And how are you feeling?” asked Patrick. “Oh, I’m grand.” Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.

I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.

Reading forces you to be quiet in a world that no longer makes place for that.

Half-drunk on well-creamed gas station coffee and the exhilarating loneliness of a freeway in nighttime.

We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.

Truth resists simplicity.

We only have so long to play in the dirt and ask questions of rivers.