The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”

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

“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.”

“I think they’re all dead. But it’s not like the Nazis had a monopoly on evil.”

But that wasn’t quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.

Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.)

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.