The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

“That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It demands to be felt.”

never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”

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.

I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

He was too smart for the kinds of solace I could offer.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

I thought of my dad telling me that the universe wants to be noticed. But what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us—not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us, as individuals.

the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.