Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour - but in face I am that kind of person.

I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.

Just spend a few more months playing video games. That hand-eye coordination will come in handy when you get to third base.

Nothing (at least that can be done by humans) immortalizes anyone. The Fault in Our Stars will hopefully have a long and wonderful life, but it will eventually go out of print, and eventually the last person ever to read it will die, and then the characters will no longer live in any consciousness.Also, that is okay. That is good, actually. That is how it should be. One of the things the characters in this novel have to grapple with is the reality of temporaryness. What Gus in particular must reconcile himself to is that being temporary does not mean being unimportant or meaningless.

Everything's uglier close up," she said. "Not you," I answered.

She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.

You can't not like "The Great Gatsby." It's got the best sentences in, like, ever.