An Abundance of Katherines

by John Green

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.

Self-professed proponent of the 4 Fs: find ’em, feel ’em, fug ’em, and forget ’em.

He needed to see the formula not as math, which he hated, but as language, which he loved.

A very John Green thought

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

that the metaphor was water beating against rocks—because, she said, both the water and the rocks ended up worse off in the bargain,

Even Colin could only name a handful of people who lived, say, 2,400 years ago. In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of that 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.

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

The wonderful thing about writing stories is that you get to pretend to be people you could never actually be.