It seems to me that all the things we keep in sealed boxes are both alive and dead until we open the box, that the unobserved is both there and not.

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.

How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" to a margin note written in her loop-heavy cursive: Straight & Fast.

Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that's true whether you're reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It's always an imagining of what it's like to be someone else.

The ideas of directing attention outward, trying to imagine other people complexly, trying not to see myself as the center of the universe - these concepts have become important to me, and I hope they're at work in my life on a minute-by-minute basis.

When we think of death, we often imagine it as happening in degrees: We think of a sick person becoming less and less alive until finally they are gone.

Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.