Home > Work > An Abundance of Katherines
1 " The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn't over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you as if it were a secret, and an immense one. "
― John Green , An Abundance of Katherines
2 " Do you know what your problem is? You can't live with the idea that someone might leave. "
3 " I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter. "
4 " I figured something out. The future is unpredictable. "
5 " Well, while you were in the bathroom, I sat down at this picnic table here in Bumblefug, Kentucky, and noticed that someone had carved that GOD HATES FAG, which, aside from being a grammatical nightmare, is absolutely ridiculous. So I'm changing it to 'God Hates Baguettes.' It's tough to disagree with that. Everybody hates baguettes. "
6 " We fatties have a bond, dude. It's like a secret society. We got all kinds of shit you don't know about. Handshakes, special fat people dances-we got these secret fugging lairs in the center of the earth and we go down there in the middle of the night when all the skinny kids are sleeping and eat cake and friend chicken and shit. Why d'you think Hollis is still sleeping, kafir? Because we were up all night in the secret lair injecting butter frosting into our veins. ...A fatty trusts another fatty. "
7 " He was a dying man looking down on the surgeons trying to save him. "
8 " Uh-uh, dude. I tried it your way with the dating and the girls and the kissing and the drama, and man, I didn't like it. Plus, my best friend is a walking cautionary tale of what happens to you when romantic relationships don't involve marriage. Like you always say, kafir, everything ends in breakup, divorce, or death. I want to narrow my misery options to divorce or death - that's all. "
9 " 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. "
10 " He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head. "
11 " That’s who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of. "
12 " And that infinitesimal change ripples outward -- even smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter -- maybe less than a lot, but always more than none. "
13 " You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting. "
14 " The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible. "
15 " He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible. "
16 " In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of the century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible. "
17 " Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories. "
18 " 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. "
19 " That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.[p214] "
20 " Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. "
