"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."
"What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?"
"You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened."
"I figured something out. The future is unpredictable."
"Here's to all the places we went. And all the places we'll go. And here's to me, whispering again and again and again and again: iloveyou"
"There's some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what."
"The problem exactly is that she dumped me. That I’m alone. Oh my God, I’m alone again. And not only that, but I’m a total failure in case you haven’t noticed. I’m washed up, I’m former. Formerly the boyfriend of Katherine XIX. Formerly a prodigy. Formerly full of potential. Currently full of shit."
"If people could see me the way I see myself - if they could live in my memories - would anyone love me?"
"What matters to you defines your mattering."
"Colin did not laugh. Instead, he thought, Tampons have strings? Why? Of all the major human mysteries—God, the nature of the universe, etc.—he knew the least about tampons. 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."
"Colin,
I hate to fulfill the Theorem, but I don’t think we should be involved romantically. The problem is that I am secretly in love with Hassan. I can’t help myself. I hold your bony shoulder blades in my hands and think of his fleshy back. I kiss your stomach and I think of his awe-inspiring gut. I like you, Colin. I really do. But—I’m sorry. It’s just not going to work. I hope we can still be friends.
Sincerely, Lindsey Lee Wells
P.S. Just kidding."
"I don't think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing."
"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."
"You know what I hate? The outdoors. I mean, generally. I don't like outside. I'm an inside person. I'm all about refrigeration and indoor plumbing and Judge Judy."
"Babies are made through an act that you will eventually find intriguing but for right now will just sort of horrify you, and also sometimes people do stuff that involves baby-making parts that does not actually involve making babies, like for instance kiss each other in places that are not on the face."
"We fatties have a bond, dude. It's like a secret society. We got all kinds of shit you don't know about. Handshakes, special fat people dances-we got these secret fugging lairs in the center of the earth and we go down there in the middle of the night when all the skinny kids are sleeping and eat cake and friend chicken and shit. Why d'you think Hollis is still sleeping, kafir? Because we were up all night in the secret lair injecting butter frosting into our veins. ...A fatty trusts another fatty."
"The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real."
"I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost."
"That smile could end wars and cure cancer."
"He missed that, too, and it hadn't even happened."
"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."
"He missed his imagined future."
“Because you’re only thinking they-might-not-like-me-they-might-not-like-me, and guess what? When you act like that, no one likes you.”
“He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible."
"And even though he felt pitiful and ridiculous, he didn’t want it to end, because he knew the absence of her would hurt more than any breakup ever could."
"When it comes to girls (and in Colin's case, it so often did), everyone has a type. Colin Singleton's type was not physical but linguistic: he liked Katherines. And not Katies or Kats or Kitties or Cathys or Rynns or Trinas or Kays or Kates or, God forbid, Catherines."
"He felt the thrill of it surge through him, his eyes blinking fast as he fought to remember the idea in its completeness. Lying there on his back in the sticky, thick air, the Eureka moment felt like a thousand orgasms all at once, except not as messy. "
"He would use his past—and the Archduke's past, and the whole endless past—to inform the future. He would impress Katherine XIX—she had always loved the idea of him being a genius—and he would make the world safer to Dumpees everywhere. He would matter. "
"I just love her so much," was Colin's answer. But the truth was that, in Colin's mind, the problems were related. The problem was that this most special, magnificent, brilliant boy was—well, not. The Problem itself was that He didn't matter."
"But mothers lie. It’s in the job description."
“Sitzpinkler” – A German word, slang for “wimp”, that literally means “a man who sits to pee.”
“‘Hassan Harbish. Sunni Muslim. Not a terrorist.’ ‘Lindsey Lee Wells. Methodist. Me, niether.’ The girl smiled again. 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.”“Schadenfreude- finding pleasure in others’ pain”
“…. People are so damn predictable.”
“And then it was the kind of dark your eyes never adjust to.”
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