So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay. -- Robert Frost

It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

You couldn't be more wrong," I said. "You are buying into the cross-stitched sentiments of your parents' throw pillows. You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it." "You're a hard person to comfort," Augustus said. "Easy comfort isn't comforting," I said.

We didn't talk much. But we didn't need to.

I wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for independent bookstores.

Dude, you're such a geek. And that's coming from an overweight Star Trek fan who scored a 5 on the AP Calculus test. So you know your condition is grave

I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him - that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.