- If the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does.
- You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.
- In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life.
- Without pain, how could we know joy?... (This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it is to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.)
- All salvation is temporary. I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever.
- Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.
- I'm like a grenade. I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties.
- People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.
- The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. But in ourselves.
- With this swing set, your children will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.
- The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.
- Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.
- 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'm in love with you.
- In freedom, most people find sin.
- 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. And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything.
- Apparently the world is not a wish-granting factory.
- You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.
- What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war with a predetermined winner.
- I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up.
- You still secretly believe that there is an element of magic to this world? It's all just soulless molecules bouncing against each other randomly. Do you worry about who will take care of you if your parents die? As well you should, because they will be worm food in the fullness of time.
- Nostalgia is a side effect of cancer... Nah, nostalgia is the side effect of dying.
- The pleasure of remembering had been taken away from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.
- I knew these people were genuinely sad, and that I wasn't really mad at them. I was mad at the universe. Even so, it infuriated me: You get all these friends just when you don't need friends anymore.
- Every cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life begets life begets life begets life.
- Pain is like a fabric. The stronger it is, the more it's worth.
- Grief does not change you. It reveals you.
- I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.
- The marks human leave are too often scars.
- The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people noticing things, paying attention.
- You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.
