Some wars," he said dismissively. "What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart is made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner.

She waited for me to play out the string, to find the place where she had stopped and was waiting for me, to follow the breadcrumb tail until it dead-ended into her.

The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all.

All the things paper-thin and paper-frail, and all the people too.

We look back to the most important moment in our history, and that becomes the dividing line between what we were and what we are now.

And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me.

In the end, what you do isn't going to be nearly as interesting or important as who you do it with.