Great Quotes From Great Novels

Page 5

"Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read that book."

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"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 am in love with you."

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"There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful."

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"There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

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[Excerpt]

"'May I see you again?' he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in his voice.

I smiled. 'Sure.'

'Tomorrow?' he asked.

'Patience, grasshopper,' I counseled. 'You don't want to seem overeager.'

'Right, that's why I said tomorrow,' he said. 'I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.' I rolled my eyes. 'I'm serious,' he said.

'You don't even know me,' I said. I grabbed the book from the center console. 'How about I call you when I finish this?'

'But you don't even have my phone number,' he said.

'I strongly suspect you wrote it in this book.'

He broke out into that goofy smile. 'And you say we don't know each other.'"

~The Fault in Our Stars by John Green