The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

So I wasn’t lying, exactly. I was just choosing among truths.

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

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”

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

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 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.

You’ll live forever in our hearts, big man. (That particularly galled me, because it implied the immortality of those left behind: You will live forever in my memory, because I will live forever! I AM YOUR GOD NOW, DEAD BOY! I OWN YOU! Thinking you won’t die is yet another side effect of dying.)

why in the hell would I be playing basketball when I could be flying or reading or looking at beautiful people or something else I actually enjoy? It’s almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than it says about either the person I was or the whatever I am now.

Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

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