"Please stop," I said. "You're upsetting the black Santas."

The act of leaning in to kiss someone, or asking them, is fraught with the possibility of rejection, so the person least likely to get rejected should do the leaning in or the asking.

And the moral of the story is that you don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened. And the second moral of the story, if a story can have multiple morals, is that Dumpers are not inherently worse than Dumpees - breaking up isn't something that gets done to you; it's something that happens with you.

Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.

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

At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.

I was born into Bolívar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps.