The best Quotes from An Abundance of Katherines

If people could see me the way I see myself - if they could live in my memories - would anyone love me?

That smile could end wars and cure cancer.

That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.

If you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain.

Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?

You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world. But you do have some say in who hurts you.

I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

There will come a time where all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings who 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 discovered will be forgotten. And all of this will have been for nothing. Maybe that time is coming soon, and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collaps of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was a time before organisms experienced conciousness and there will be a time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivon worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does.

We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken.

She loved mysteries so much that she became one.

Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always'.

The only way out of this labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.

The world is not a wish-granting factory.

I'm in love with cities I've never been to and people I've never met.

The marks humans leave are too often scars.

You can love someone so much... but you can never love people as much as you can miss them.

I'm Starting to realize that people lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.

That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.

I'll fight it. I'll fight it for you. Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I'm okay. I'll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time.

But I believe in true love, you know? I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

Being different isn't a bad thing. It means you're brave enough to be yourself.

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

We can be only who we are; no more, no less.

I am thankful to all those who said NO to me. It's because of them I did it myself.

My son Jack once said to me, "Dad, do you think people are laughing with you or at you?"
I said, "I don't care as long as they're laughing."

For the soul, laughing is what oxygen is for the lungs.

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.

A smile is the shortest distance between two people.

A smile is the best makeup a girl can wear.

If you want the rainbow you have to deal with the rain.

Funerals, I've decided, are not for the dead. They are for the living.

But I believe in true love, you know? I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.

I am 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 one day all our labor will be returned to dust. And I know that the sun will swallow the only earth we will ever have. And I am in love with you.

I believe we have a choice in this world about how to tell sad stories. On the one hand, you can sugarcoat it the way they do in movies and romance novels, where beautiful people learn beautiful lessons, where nothing is too messed up that can't be fixed with an apology and a Peter Gabriel song. I like that version as much as the next girl, believe me. It's just not the truth. This is the truth. Sorry.

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not f*ck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.

Because you simply cannot draw these things out for ever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.

"Why are you wearing a fox hat?"
"Because no one can catch the motherf*cking fox."

Dude, I don't want to talk about Lacey's prom shoes. And I'll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It's called a penis.

It was nice - in the dark and the quiet... and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing.

Walk until the darkness is a memory, and you become the sun on the next traveler's horizon.

Humans had always been better at killing than any other living thing.

"And what if there's nothing in there?"
"You die and there's nothing beyond that. Nothing. Nothing remains. Someone might remember you for a little while after but not for long."