"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire." Roland Barthes

"That is part of the beauty of literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong." F Scott Fitzgerald

"You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are." John Green

"I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once." John Green

"I’m not saying it was your fault. I’m saying it wasn’t nice." John Green

"I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void. And that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you." John Green

"I will not tell you our love story, because – like all real love stories – it will die with us, as it should." John Green

"Writing does not resurrect. It buries." John Green

"It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things." John Green

"How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV." John Green

"you can never love people as much as you can miss them." John Green

"I’m a not-doer. Like, I’m lazy, but I’m also good at not-doing things I’m not supposed to do. I never drank or did drugs or hooked up with girls or beat people up or stole anything. I was always good at that…" John Green

"we all matter—maybe less than a lot, but always more than none." John Green

"’You don’t give a shit if people like you.’ Which was both true and not. I care more than I’d like to" John Green

"I couldn’t help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them—it was a kind of sad I didn’t mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all." John Green

"you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken, If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?... I like the strings. I always have. Because that’s how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is, I think. We’re not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me to imagine you as an actual person. But we’re not different sprouts from the same plant. I can’t be you. You can’t be me. You can imagine another well—but never quite perfectly, you know? Maybe its’ more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen—these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it rains inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open and when we finally fall apart. And it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of our selves through the cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out." John Green

"The body that carries us through life also carries the Divine." Shane Hipps

"Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefly by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed." Alan Jacobs

"We should affirm the great value of reading just for the fun of it... In my experience, Christians are strangely reluctant to take this advice. We tend to be earnest people, always striving for self-improvement, and can be suspicious of mere recreation. But God doesn’t just create, he takes delight in his creation, and expects us to delight in it too; and since he has given us the desire to make things ourselves—...we may rightly take delight in the things that we (and others) make. Reading for the sheer delight of it—reading at whim—is therefore one of the most important kinds of reading there is.” Alan Jacobs

"Once you experience enormity, it lingers everywhere you look, and wants to be every word you say." David Levithan

"beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain." David Levithan

"Any time I let it, the weight of living creeps in and starts to drag her down. It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored." David Levithan

"There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go. David Levithan

"I wanted love to conquer all. But love can’t conquer anything. It can’t do anything on its own. It relies on us to do the conquering on its behalf." David Levithan

"I never thought I would need bravery in the small moments of my life. I do." Veronica Roth

"It happened. It was awful. You aren’t perfect. That’s all there is. Don’t confuse your grief with guilt." Veronica Roth

"I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen” Walt Whitman