An Abundance of Katherines

by John Green

Driving was a kind of thinking, the only kind he could then tolerate.

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.

“Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.”*

That smile could end wars and cure cancer.

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

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

“Dude, you’re such a geek. And that’s coming from an overweight Star Trek fan who scored a 5 on the AP Calculus test. So you know your condition is grave.”

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.

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

I’m an inside person. I’m all about refrigeration and indoor plumbing and Judge Judy.”

People are supposed to care. It’s good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they’re gone.

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