Being a person, I had come to realize, is a communal activity. Dogs know how to be dogs. But people do not know how to be people unless and until they learn from other people.

We all romanticize the people we adore.

I love you' really is the gateway drug of breaking up.

Only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn’t unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn’t want to.

You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you. All efforts to save me from you will fail.

The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.

I wasn't disappointed. My expectations had been met.