Colin emphatically pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading. "Did you like it?" His dad asked. "Yup," Colin said. He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

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.

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.

Ya gotta live somewhere, but also you GET to live somewhere.

I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?

Is the labyrinth living or dying?

That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.