John Green - An Abundance of Katherines (2006)

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But you know what they say about Gutshot: the population never goes up and never goes down, because every time a woman gets pregnant, a man leaves town.

John Green
There's a place in the brain for knowing what cannot be remembered.

John Green
The act of leaning in to kiss someone, or asking them, is fraught with the possibility of rejection, so the person least likely to get rejected should do the leaning in or the asking.

John Green
He wanted to draw out the moment before the moment—because as good as kissing feels, nothing feels as good as the anticipation of it.

John Green
They like their coffee like they like their ex-boyfriends: bitter.

John Green
He'd never been all that good at math, but he was a goddamned world-famous expert in getting dumped.

John Green
People are supposed to care. It's good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they're gone.

John Green
I couldn't hear a thing in the world but you. And it was so cold then, and so silent, and I loved you so much. Now it's hot and dead quiet again, and I love you still.

John Green
I hadn't been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.

John Green
That's why people grow weary of listening to Dumpees obsess over their troubles: getting dumped is predictable, repetitive, and boring. They want to stay friends; they feel smothered; it's always them and it's never you; and afterward, you're devastated and their relieved; it's over for them and just starting for you.

John Green
In the first century CE, Roman authorities punished St. Apollonia by crushing her teeth one by one with pliers. Colin often thought about this in relationship to the monotony of dumping: we have thirty-two teeth. After a while, having each tooth individually destroyed probably gets repetitive, even dull. But it never stops hurting.

John Green
I just want to fly under the radar, because when you start to make yourself into a big deal, that's when you get shot down.

John Green
He liked the idea of coffee quite a lot—a warm drink that gave you energy and had been for centuries associated with sophisticates and intellectuals. But coffee itself tasted to him like caffeinated stomach bile.

John Green
Incidentally, did you know that the whole eight glasses a day thing is complete bullshit and has no scientific basis? So many things are like that. Everyone just assumes they're true, because people are basically lazy and incurious, which incidentally is one of those words that sounds like it wouldn't be a word but is.

John Green
The French verb aimer has two meanings. And that's why he liked her, and loved her. She spoke to him in a language that, no matter how hard you studied it, could not be completely understood.

John Green
There's a stark difference between the words 'prodigy' and 'genius.' Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn; geniuses do.

John Green
And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other - maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.

John Green
That's why those tapes we made are going to be so great one day, because they'll tell stories that time has swallowed up or distorted or whatever.

John Green
It was, he thought, just like how authors always wrote things in ways other than how they actually happened.

John Green
She was nothing but good and I was nothing but bad, but then she died, and I didn't.

John Green
Babies are made through an act that you will eventually find intriguing but for right now will just sort of horrify you, and also sometimes people do stuff that involves baby-making parts that does not actually involve making babies, like for instance kiss each other in places that are not on the face.

John Green
Daddy is trying really fugging hard to think of a not-terrifying reason why you'd wake Daddy up in the middle of the night to ask that fugging question. But no. No. Daddy does not have a match or a lighter.

John Green
Colin believed that the world contained exactly two kinds of people: Dumpers and Dumpees. A lot of people will claim to be both, but those people miss the point entirely: You are predisposed to either one fate or the other. Dumpers may not always be the heartbreakers, and the Dumpees may not always be the heartbroken. But everyone has a tendency.

John Green
And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus. Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something.

John Green
I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater. But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried.

John Green
They'd just driven past the General Store when Hassan said, "We don't have to go to Hardee's really. We could go anywhere."
"Oh good because I really don't want to go to Hardee's," Lindsey said. "It's sort of horrible. There's a Wendy's two exits down the interstate, in Milan. Wendy's is way better. They have, like, salads."

John Green
That's what I realized: if I did get her back somehow, she wouldn't fill the hole that losing her created.

John Green
I was thinking about this girl you love so much," she said, "And this place I love so much. And how that happens. How you can just fall into it.

John Green