“Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don't they try to understand the song of the birds? Why do they love a night, a flower, everything which surrounds man, without attempting to understand them? Whereas where painting is concerned, they want to understand. Let them understand above all that t…”— Pablo Picasso, amazon.com
“Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me.”— John Green, Chip, amazon.com
“He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish life. The rest was darkness. 'Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!'”— John Green, The General In His Labyrinth, amazon.com
“That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“That's the mystery, isn't it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape--the world or the end of it?”— John Green, Alaska Young, amazon.com
“I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible for me.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out - but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.”— John Green, Chip, amazon.com
“More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“Suffering is universal. it’s the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left…”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“'Sometimes I don't get you,' I said. She didn't even glance at me. She just smiled toward the television and said, 'You'll never get me. That's the whole point.'”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“I would never know her well enough to know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if she left us on purpose. But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love.”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go…”— John Green, Miles 'Pudge' Halter, amazon.com
“Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.”— John Green, Alaska Young, amazon.com
“When anyone escapes, my heart leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, I am half on the side of the leaver.”— Sharon Olds, amazon.com