Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, “I won’t be a mother anymore.” The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relationship survives. (It changes, but it survives.)

At the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.

It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

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.

This was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die."- Paper Towns