An Abundance of Katherines

by John Green

Colin had always preferred baths; one of his general policies in life was never to do anything standing up that could just as easily be done lying down.

But mothers lie. It’s in the job description.

He was a generally pessimistic person, but he seemed to make an exception for Katherines: he always felt they would come back to him.

“What a dick,” Hassan said once they were safely inside the Hearse. “It’s one thing to accuse me of laziness. But to malign the good name of America’s greatest television judge—that’s below the belt.”

You’re a very special person. 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.

And if only Colin had known that he was missing a piece, that his inability to see himself in the story of a circle was an unfixable problem, he might have known that the rest of the world would catch up with him as time passed.

Colin wasn’t thinking about anything but himself and K-19 and the piece of his gut he’d misplaced—but there was no denying her smile. That smile could end wars and cure cancer.

What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?

What Colin liked about Curve was not its smell on the skin but its sillage, the fruity sweet smell of its leaving.

“You don’t need a girlfriend, Colin. You need a robot who says nothing but ‘I love you.’”

To Colin, tampons were a little bit like grizzly bears: he was aware of their existence, but he’d never seen one in the wild, and didn’t really care to.

“There’s no romance in geometry,”

What happens is the water spray creates a vortex, kind of like a hurricane. And the center of the vortex—the eye of the hurricane—is a low-pressure area, which sucks the shower curtain in and up. This guy did a study on it. Honestly.”

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.

“Or maybe,” he said, “you’re saying it because you’re flattered I’ve spent eight years of my life chasing after the nine letters in your name.”

It’s different being invisible with someone.”

The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.

“Anybody can see that when he* is not rooting or sleeping, he is studying devilment. He shows remarkable understanding of human speech, especially profane speech, and even an uncanny gift of reading men’s thoughts, whenever those thoughts are directed against the peace and dignity of pigship.”

A generation from now there might not be a factory and I want your kids and their kids to know what it was like, what we were like.

You matter as much as the things that matter to you do.

That’s what I’ve been thinking, that maybe life is not about accomplishing some bullshit markers.

I will get forgotten, but the stories will last.

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.