I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him - that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.

If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be my flowers.

A paper town for a paper girl.

I'll fight it. I'll fight it for you. Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I'm okay. I'll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time.

It's total bullshit," he said. "The whole thing. Eighty percent survival rate and he's in the twenty percent? Bullshit. He was such a bright kid. It's bullshit. I hate it. But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?

Random questions are the least random of all questions.

I wanted to, you know, get my story out in the world, which, it turns out, is a very misguided notion.