Reset, readjust, restart, refocus.As many times as you need to.
Just don't quit!
Energy flows where attention goes.
To get what you really want in life, you need a clear goal that has purpose and meaning behind it.
Once this is in place, you can focus your energy on the goal and become obsessive about it.
When you learn how to focus your energy, amazing things happen.
MermaidDiagram Comment.
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
Some people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said."Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.
Some people have lives; some people have music.
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.
We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.
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.
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
When things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It's because a little piece gets lost - the two remaining ends couldn't fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.
It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.
I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.
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.
As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.
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.
The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.
What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.
Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will
Sometimes people don’t understandthe promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course.But you keep the promise anyway. That’swhat love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?
Nerd girls are the world’s most underutilized romantic resource. And guys, do not tell me that nerd girls are not hot because that shows a Paris Hilton-esque failure to understand hotness.
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.
I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.
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.
I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.
There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn't.
Why don’t we break up? I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do.
And then the line was quite but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.
I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.
I'll fight it. I'll fight it for you. Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I'm okay. I'll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time.
You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape 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.
The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.
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.)
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.
The Colonel led all the cheers.Cornbread!" he screamed.CHICKEN!" the crowd responded.Rice!"PEAS!"And then, all together: "WE GOT HIGHER SATs."Hip Hip Hip Hooray!" the Colonel cried.YOU'LL BE WORKIN' FOR US SOMEDAY!
I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn't hate people who watched or played them.
Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.
Imagine others complexly.
Maybe 'Okay' will be our 'always'...
Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone's about to die.
We need never be without hope because we can never be irreparably broken.
I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.
You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves.
Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.
Photographs are just light and time,
She noted, more than once, that the meteor shower was happening, beyond the overcast sky, even if we could not see it. Who cares if she can kiss? She can see through the clouds.
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.
At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.
You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.
I just think if you don't say the honest thing, sometimes the honest thing never becomes true, you know, and I-
Ergo: girls should always make the first move, because (a) they are, on the whole, less likely to be rejected than guys, (b) that way, girls will never get kissed unless they want to be kissed.
It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations.
The thing about dead people... The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them, but the truth is... complicated, I guess.
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.
I believe in hope, in what is something called ”radical hope.” I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r
That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.
We never really talked much or even looked at each other, but it didn't matter because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe even more intimate than eye contact anyway. I mean, anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.
Augustus," I said. "Really. You don't have to do this.""Sure I do," he said. "I found my Wish.""God, you're the best," I told him."I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel," he answered.
If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything.
Just deleting vandalism on the Chuck Norris page," Radar said. "For instance, while I do think that Chuck Norris specializes in the roundhouse kick, I don't think it's accurate to say, 'Chuck Norris's tears can cure cancer, but unfortunately he has never cried.
Dude, I don’t want to talk about Lacey’s prom shoes. And I’ll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It’s called a penis.
Just move to the Internet, its great here. We get to live inside where the weather is always awesome.
Suffering can bend & break us. But it can also break us open to become the persons God intended us to be. It depends on what we do with the pain. If we offer it back to God, He will use it to do great things in us & through us, because suffering is fertile... it an grow new life.
We all romanticize the people we adore.
If you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain.
I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.
Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning,' and Isben looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he died.
It's not how you die. It's who you die.
I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.
he is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with. i have to believe that’s a sign.
There is no try. There is only do.
You know what's lame, Pudge? I really care about her. I mean, we were hopeless. Badly matched. But still. I mean, I said I loved her... I mean, it's stupid to miss someone you didn't even get along with. but I don't know, it was nice, you know, having someone you could always fight with.
What a slut time is. She screws with everybody.
What a slut time is. She screws everybody...
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 sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.
You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.
Do you know what your problem is? You can't live with the idea that someone might leave.
Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? But I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself—if they could live in my memories—would anyone, anyone, love me?
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.
I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life..
I was born into Bolívar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps.
Every year, many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you.
My whole life I though I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along.
When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself.
My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really - which meant I guess that he was still living, too.
Colder by the hour, more dead with every breath.
You can't just make me different and then leave
And then I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out my cannula so I could smell better, breathing him and out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest burning until I couldn't distinguish among the pains.
I don't care if the New York Times writes an obituary for me. I just want you to write one. ... You say you're not special because the world doesn't know about you, but that's an insult to me. I know about you.
I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.
... The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real....
I wouldn't have cared if my girlfriend was a Jaguar-driving Cyclops with a beard - I'd have been grateful just to have someone to make out with.
Imagine a world where are facts, but there are also alternate facts and you have to choose between your set of facts before you reach a conclusion. That would be unlivable!
Keeping the box closed just keeps you in the dark, not the universe... but failing to open the box doesn't kill the cat.
It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.
Love is keeping the promise anyway.
I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it.
I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies.
Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future.
To be alive is to be missing.
I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.
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.
As far as I can tell, there are two basic (kissing) rules: 1. Don't bite anything without permission. 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful, and should be used sparingly.
He specialized in the murder of dreams, Hazel Grace...
The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness:'I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.
You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.
Principled hate is a hell of a lot stronger than "Boy, I wish you hadn't mummified me and thrown me into the lake" hate.
Ben, if you get pee in my brand-new car, I am going to cut your balls off."Still peeing, Ben looks over at me smirking. "You´re gonna need a hell of a big knife, bro.
Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you," and the Colonel whispered, "I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did," and I said, "No. Not past tense." She wasn't even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense.
The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.
Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.
She cannot possibly be dead, people do not just die
You can’t unsaw a tree, but you can’t unsee one either.
We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?
Dear Teens at Starbucks wearing 'Abstain from Sex 2 Attain Ur Goals' t-shirts: Doesn't it depend on what my goals are?
Knowledge Strategy Execution
Motivation is a byproduct of action, not the catalyst for it.
Control your thoughts or your thoughts will control you.
Today is a new day. Stop living in the past.
Focus on the step in front of you, not the whole staircase.
You attract what you are, not what you want. If you want great, then be great.
Your goals should scare you a little and excite you a lot.
