feeling - probably for the first time in my life - the fear and excitement of living in a place where you never know what's going to happen or when.

I'm a grenade, I just want to stay away from people and read books, and think.

You can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can't say that Alabamans as a people are duly afraid of deep fryers.

Throughout the book, she refers to herself as "the side effect," which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible.

For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

You say you're not special because the world doesn't know about you, but that's an insult to me. I know about you.

I nodded. I liked Augustus Waters. I really, really, really liked him. I liked the way his story ended with someone else. I liked his voice. I liked that he took existentially fraught free throws. I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointment in the Department of Having a Voice That Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin. And I liked that he had two names. I’ve always liked people with two names, because you get to make up your mind what you call them: Gus or Augustus? Me, I was always just Hazel, univalent Hazel.