"Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well."

"Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die."

"I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)"

"As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story."

"Headline?" he asked."'Swing Set Needs Home,'" I said."'Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,'" he said."'Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,'" I said."

"What the hell is that?" I laughed."It's my fox hat.""Your fox hat?""Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat.""Why are you wearing your fox hat?" I asked."Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox."

"Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself."

"Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seem running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God."

"I was born into Bolívar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps."

"There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going."

"The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention."

"I figured something out. The future is unpredictable."

"It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world."

"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."

"It is worth it to leave behing my minor life for grander maybes-Miles "Pudge"

"What about the rest of your life?"She shrugged. "What about it?""Aren't you worried about, like, forever?""Forever is composed of nows," she says."

"Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future."

"I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies."

"I must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?"

"I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it."

"I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter."

"I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose."