The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)

“I love it when you talk medical to me,”

the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.)

I know boys aren’t supposed to be, but he was.

clawing scraping inside-out ache of underoxygenation.

(Spoiler alert: He lives.)

the book ends right in the middle of a

managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath.

the tears not like tears so much as a quiet metronome—steady, endless.

I was thinking about the word handle, and all the unholdable things that get handled.

but she doesn’t have to handle it. And you do.”

“Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,”

Love is keeping the promise anyway.

She promised me always.”

“You look a little . . . Pardon the double entendre, my friend, but there’s something a little worrisome in your eyes.”

cigarette still in his mouth, and half smiled.

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

(cute but frankly not Augustinian)

given that eating tired me.

“‘Say your life broke down. The last good kiss / You had was years ago.’”

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.

“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 know. I wanted to. I like watching you sleep.” “Said the creeper.”

“The beautiful couple is beautiful.”

“I love love love you,” which was two more loves than usual.

“No,” I said. Panic rolled in, pulled me under.

“I lit up like a Christmas tree, Hazel Grace.

I couldn’t unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn’t want to.

There is no honor in dying of.”

“Would it be absolutely ludicrous to try to make out?” “There is no try,” I said. “There is only do.”

“Oh, thank God it’s you. Hi. Hi, I love you.”

“This is it. I can’t even not smoke anymore.”

“I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me fucking die.”

a pitiful boy who desperately wanted not to be pitiful,

kept him alive, but not alive enough.

finally and irrevocably robbed of his ambitions.

“It’s my last shred of dignity. It’s very small.”

“Right, it’s primarily his hotness,” I said.

“Terrible tragedy, that. But can I help my own deadly beauty?” “You cannot.”

Seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace’s breath away,” he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.

that was the last good day I had with Gus until the Last Good Day.

“I love you,” he said. “And I you,”

because I do not want to see a world without him.”

I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.

Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

Augustus Waters died eight days after his prefuneral,

The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters’s death was Augustus Waters.

And here it was, the great and terrible ten,

You will live forever in my memory, because I will live forever! I AM YOUR GOD NOW, DEAD BOY! I OWN YOU!

“You can light these,” I whispered to him. “I won’t mind.”