Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business.

All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.

It is a good life, Hazel Grace.

Too pissed off to cry, I said, 'This is only making me hate her. I don't want to hate her. And what's the point, if that's all it's making me do?' Still refusing to answer how and why questions. Still insisting on an aura of mystery. I leaned forward, head between by knees, and the Colonel placed a head on my upper back. 'The point is that there are always alsweres, Pudge.' And then he pushed air out between his pursed lips and I could hear the angry quiver in his voice as he repeated, 'There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.' ~Miles/Pudge and Chip/the Colonel, pg 168

I think that most of us [writers] would rather have an audience than countless riches. If we wanted to be rich, we'd be doing smething else.

It was not an eventful day. I should have done extraordinary things. I should have sucked the marrow out of life. But on that day, I slept eighteen hours out of a possible twenty-four.

Like all sick children,' he answered dispassionately, 'you say you don't want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.