The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.

There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.

My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.

And we remember in our hearts those whom we knew and loved who have gone home to you: Maria and Kade and Joseph and Haley and Abigail and Angelina and Taylor and Gabriel and…” It was a long list. The world contains a lot of dead people. And while Patrick droned on, reading the list from a sheet of paper because it was too long to memorize, I kept my eyes closed, trying to think prayerfully but mostly imagining the day when my name would find its way onto that list, all the way at the end when everyone had stopped listening.

In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life.”

“So what’s your story?” he asked, sitting down next to me at a safe distance. “I already told you my story. I was diagnosed when—” “No, not your cancer story. Your story. Interests, hobbies, passions, weird fetishes, etcetera.” “Um,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It’s disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven’t let it succeed prematurely.”

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

movie. I don’t know why boys expect us to like boy movies. We don’t expect them to like girl movies.

Mom’s policy was never to wake me up, because one of the job requirements of Professional Sick Person is sleeping a lot,

“What in heaven is that?” asked Kaitlyn, gesturing to the book. “Oh, it’s sci-fi. I’ve gotten kinda into it. It’s a series.” “I am alarmed. Shall we shop?”

Any attempts to feign normal social interactions were just depressing because it was so glaringly obvious that everyone I spoke to for the rest of my life would feel awkward and self-conscious around me, except maybe kids like Jackie who just didn’t know any better.

understood the story ended because Anna died or got too sick to write and this midsentence thing was supposed to reflect how life really ends and whatever, but there were characters other than Anna in the story, and it seemed unfair that I would never find out what happened to them.

I enjoyed being coy.

Our little backyard was dominated by my childhood swing set, which was looking pretty waterlogged and pathetic.

“Pain demands to be felt,”

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

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

Mom and Dad talked about this earthquake that had just happened in Papua New Guinea. They met in the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea, and so whenever anything happened there, even something terrible, it was like all of a sudden they were not large sedentary creatures, but the young and idealistic and self-sufficient and rugged people they had once been, and their rapture was such that they didn’t even glance over at me

If something was wrong, I’d find out soon enough. Nothing to be gained by worrying between now and then.

Mayhem grits his teeth a lot in these books. He’s definitely going to get TMJ, if he survives all this combat.”

Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness,’”

I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.

people keep saying my other senses will improve to compensate, but CLEARLY NOT YET. Hi, Support Group Hazel. Come over here so I can examine your face with my hands and see deeper into your soul than a sighted person ever could.”

“Are you a friend?” she asked, which struck me as one of those unintentionally broad and unanswerable questions.

it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, “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 fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

Even though I hated the sympathy people felt toward me, I couldn’t help but feel it toward him.

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.

You’re arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that’s a lie,

“Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center.”

“Do you know,” he asked in a delicious accent, “what Dom Pérignon said after inventing champagne?” “No?” I said. “He called out to his fellow monks, ‘Come quickly: I am tasting the stars.’

I fear that I won’t get either a life or a death that means anything.”

the definition of humanness is the opportunity to marvel at the majesty of creation

That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.”

“Like all sick children,” he answered dispassionately, “you say you don’t want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.”

“But he didn’t survive a war, not really,” Augustus said. “He survived a genocide.”

“And my conclusion is,” he said, “since I had been in very good terms with Anne, that most parents don’t know really their children.”

we saw pages of Anne’s diary, and also her unpublished book of quotations. The quote book happened to be turned to a page of Shakespeare quotations. For who so firm that cannot be seduced? she’d written.

You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice:

the absolute sterility of the place made me nostalgic for the happy-kid bullshit at Children’s.

nostalgia is a side effect of dying,”

“it’s kids’ stuff, but I always thought my obituary would be in all the newspapers, that I’d have a story worth telling. I always had this secret suspicion that I was special.” “You are,” I said. “You know what I mean, though,”

it is possible to live with pain.”