An Abundance of Katherines

by John Green

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.

She said I love you as if it were a secret, and an immense one.

Colin Singleton could no more stay cool than a blue whale could stay skinny or Bangladesh could stay rich.

Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word—forever—and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage.

“Singleton, you need to believe in God worse than anyone I ever met.”

And you know why? I got me some God.”

“I’m trying to save your sorry ass from hell!” “Get off or I’m going there quite soon,” Colin wheezed.

Colin would hear this a lot, and yet—somehow—he could never hear it enough.

He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

there was no denying her smile. That smile could end wars and cure cancer.

Although he was not a religious person, seeing the skyline made him feel

then he wanted to say he was sorry, but just that sometimes he felt un-understandable and sometimes he worried when they bickered and she went a while without saying she loved him,

They laughed. He had never loved her so much as he did then.

it felt like the air had been shocked out of him.

felt as if his getting dumped was the only thing happening on the entire dark and silent planet, and also as if it weren’t happening at all.

“I love you so much and I just want you to love me like I love you,” he said as softly as he could.

And it felt like being stoned and sticked from the inside, a fluttering and then a sharp pain in his lower rib cage, and then he felt for the first time that a piece of his gut had been wrenched out of him.

he knew the absence of her would hurt more than any breakup ever could.

He didn’t like secrets kept from him. Being on the outside of something annoyed him—more than it should have, really.

“It ain’t much,” she said. “But it’s home.”

“It’s very weird to watch your brain work,”

And the smell brought him back so viscerally, to a time when she loved him—or he at least felt like she did—that his gut ached anew. He closed his eyes tight for a second and waited for the feeling to pass, but it wouldn’t. For Colin, nothing ever passed.

he felt, in the throbbing missing piece inside him,

“I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.”

And that, Colin found himself thinking, must mean that we are friends. Almost by accident,

it hadn’t even happened. He missed his imagined future.

You can love someone so much, he thought. But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

that there’s some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.”

“How do you just stop being terrified of getting left behind and ending up by yourself forever and not meaning anything to the world?”

I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And

You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don’t even know why you need it; you just think you do.”

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

Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don’t see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.

“And the moral of the story is that you don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

that Dumpers are not inherently worse than Dumpees—breaking up isn’t something that gets done to you; it’s something that happens with you.”

if the future is forever, he thought, then eventually it will swallow us all up.

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.

Even if it’s a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward—ever 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.

Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.

And for the first time in his life, he smiled thinking about the always-coming infinite future stretching out before him.

Colin’s skin was alive with the feeling of connection to everyone in that car and everyone not in it. And he was feeling not-unique in the very best possible way.