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“There will come a time,” I said, “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”—I gestured encompassingly—“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
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this is something to crisis over
Cosette liked this
The world contains a lot of dead people.
Prob more dead than living tbh
I kept my eyes closed, trying to think prayerfully but mostly imagining the day when my name would find its way onto that list,
“Quick, give me a throw pillow and some thread because that needs to be an Encouragement,”
I’ve always liked people with two names, because you get to make up your mind what you call them: Gus or Augustus? Me, I was always just Hazel, univalent Hazel.
But in AIA, Anna decides that being a person with cancer who starts a cancer charity is a bit narcissistic, so she starts a charity called The Anna Foundation for People with Cancer Who Want to Cure Cholera.
Flirting was new to me, but I liked it.
Manifesting this for 2023
“That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It demands to be felt.”
And yet still I worried. I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.
I mean, he’s blind. So that’s unfortunate.
A bit of an understatement
Don’t worry. Worry is useless.
“I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel,”
I mean, he was gorgeous. I was attracted to him. I thought about him in that way, to borrow a phrase from the middle school vernacular. But the actual touch, the realized touch…it was all wrong.
I never thought my first real sexual action would be prostitutional.
As the great Christi Lukasiak once said: prostitots
The things I would do to that boy.
Maybe…are you gay?”
“I’m like. Like. I’m like a grenade, Mom. I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”
Me when I'm having a mental breakdown
(But we both know that okay is a very flirty word. Okay is BURSTING with sensuality.)
I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”
Oh look a reference to the title of the book
“Can we call Dr. Maria and ask if international travel would kill me?”
“But before that, my grand romantic gesture would have totally gotten me laid.”
“Hazel Grace,” he said, “do you have a pen and a piece of paper?” I said I did. “Okay, please draw a circle.” I did. “Now draw a smaller circle within that circle.” I did. “The larger circle is virgins. The smaller circle is seventeen-year-old guys with one leg.”
Wheezing
the sky is depressing me,
“That’s why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates an adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”
No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can’t go all the way around.
I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
We were sitting there on the couch together, and he pushed himself up to go but then fell back down onto the couch and sneaked a kiss onto my cheek.
Bbys first kiss
Everything’s coming up Waters.
“Keep your shit together,”
Said me, to me, every damn day of my life.
Gus never. Talks. About. Anything. Else.”
HES SO IN LOVE WITH HER I CANT
I argued with Mom that I should have slightly more than half of the suitcase, since without me and my cancer, we’d never be going to Amsterdam in the first place. Mom countered that since she was twice as large as me and therefore required more physical fabric to preserve her modesty, she deserved at least two-thirds of the suitcase.
The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.
Omg I never realised this
“The thing about eggs, though,” he said, “is that breakfastization gives the scrambled egg a certain sacrality, right? You can get yourself some bacon or Cheddar cheese anywhere anytime, from tacos to breakfast sandwiches to grilled cheese, but scrambled eggs—they’re important.”
I didn’t want to look at them, so I looked away, and to look away was to look at Augustus.
When surprised and excited and innocent Gus emerged from Grand Gesture Metaphorically Inclined Augustus, I literally could not resist.
“Observation: It would be awesome to fly in a superfast airplane that could chase the sunrise around the world for a while.”
“I’m in love with you,” he said quietly. “Augustus,” I said. “I am,” he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. “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.”
HE SAID IT HE FUCKING SAID IT HES IN LOVE AND HE KNOWS IT AND SHE KNOWS IT
“The beautiful couple is beautiful.”
“You are a side effect,” Van Houten continued, “of an evolutionary process that cares little for individual lives. You are a failed experiment in mutation.”
#nevermeetyourheroes
“I’ll write you an epilogue,” Gus said. That made me cry harder. “I will,” he said. “I will. Better than any shit that drunk could write. His brain is Swiss cheese. He doesn’t even remember writing the book. I can write ten times the story that guy can. There will be blood and guts and sacrifice. An Imperial Affliction meets The Price of Dawn. You’ll love it.”
He's such a fucking gentleman if only he were a real person
“Oh, no no, he is of the Van Houtens,” she said. “In the seventeenth century, his ancestor discovered how to mix cocoa into water. Some Van Houtens moved to the United States long ago, and Peter is of those, but he moved to Holland after his novel. He is an embarrassment to a great family.”
Pause must Google to verify (update: this is real.)
And then we were kissing. My hand let go of the oxygen cart and I reached up for his neck, and he pulled me up by my waist onto my tiptoes. As his parted lips met mine, I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way. The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body; this cancer-ruined thing I’d spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors.
SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP
“Just out of shape, Hazel Grace. All is well.”
No. Tell me he is not sick.
“It’s above my knee and it just tapers a little and then it’s just skin. There’s a nasty scar, but it just looks like—” “What?” I asked. “My leg,” he said. “Just so you’re prepared in case, I mean, in case you see it or what—” “Oh, get over yourself,” I said, and took the two steps I needed to get to him. I kissed him, hard, pressing him against the wall, and I kept kissing him as he fumbled for the room key.
hot
“Just before you went into the ICU, I started to feel this ache in my hip.”
SHUT UP
“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.”
Dad had a sign of his own. MY BEAUTIFUL FAMILY, it read, and then underneath that (AND GUS).
