Oh, my god," Augustus said. "i can't believe i have a crush on a girl with such cliché wishes." "i was thirteen," i said again, although of course i was only thinking "crush crush crush crush crush". I was flattered but changed the subject immediately.

When people call people nerds, mostly what they're saying is, 'you like stuff.' Which is not a good insult at all, like, 'you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human conscience.

That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.

Reading it the night before, I'd wondered if it would be like that for me-if in one moment, I would finally understand her, know her, and understand the role I'd played in her dying. But I wasn't convinced enlightenment struck like lightining.

That's why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates a adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business—and I wanted to try to reflect that.

It always happened like this: he would look and look for the keys to Satan’s Hearse and then finally he’d just give up and say, “Fine. I’ll take the fugging bus,” and on his way out the door, he’d see the keys. Keys show up when you reconcile yourself to the bus; Katherines appear when you start to disbelieve the world contains another Katherine; and, sure enough, the Eureka moment arrived just as he began to accept it would never come.