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Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.
But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)
Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.
I gotta outlast four of these bastards.)
like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you.
“If you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.”
“You don’t take pot, for starters.”
“See, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you go...
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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.
The guy was still staring at me. I felt rather blushy.
battles won amid wars sure to be lost;
“I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.”
“Too soon,”
“Was that insen...
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“I can be pretty blind to other peopl...
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I was, I’m sure he assumed, opening up. Becoming Part Of The Group.
“There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured encompassingly—“will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There
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“Goddamn,”
“Aren’t you something else.”
It was a long list. The world contains a lot of dead people.
I was telling my surgeon that I’d rather be deaf than blind. And he said, ‘It doesn’t work that way,’
All right, I should go. Monica’s waiting for me. I gotta look at her a lot while I can.”
“We are literally in the heart of Jesus,”
“Someone should tell Jesus,”
it’s gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because you’re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.”
“I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end i...
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“Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can’t help but fall for a boy she knows is trouble. It’s your autobiography, so far as I can tell.”
His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on.
Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. Then, if it likes you, it takes the rest.
His hand reached for her boob over her shirt and pawed at it, his palm still while his fingers moved around. I wondered if that felt good. Didn’t seem like it would, but I decided to forgive Isaac on the grounds that he was going blind. The senses must feast while there is yet hunger and whatever.
“I think he’s hurting her boob,”
“Yes, it’s difficult to ascertain whether he is trying to arouse her or perform a breast exam.”
“The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his house.
“They don’t kill you unless you light them,”
“And I’ve never lit one. It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”
“I’m going to a movie with Augustus Waters,”
his driving was so astonishingly poor that I could think of nothing else.
“I failed the driving test three times.” “You don’t say.”
‘Your driving is unpleasant, but it isn’t technically unsafe.’”
(I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)
But even so, there’s a certain unpleasantness to drowning, particularly when it occurs over the course of several months.
“Are you ready, sweetie?” and I told her I was ready, and my dad just kept telling me he loved me in this voice that was not breaking so much as already broken, and I kept telling him that I loved him, too, and everyone was holding hands, and I couldn’t catch my breath, and my lungs were acting desperate, gasping, pulling me out of the bed trying to find a position that could get them air, and I was embarrassed by their desperation, disgusted that they wouldn’t just let go, and I remember my mom telling me it was okay, that I was okay, that I would be okay, and my father was trying so hard not
to sob that when he did, which was regularly, it was an earthquake. And I remember wanting not to be awake.
ly John Green can write a sentence that long and make it make sense. So rhythmic and still so impactful.
I woke up and soon got into one of those experimental trials that are famous in the Republic of Cancervania for Not Working.
I could feel the muscle right beneath the skin, all tense and amazing.
They didn’t seem too surprised by my arrival, which made sense: The fact that Augustus made me feel special did not necessarily indicate that I was special.
Maybe he brought home a different girl every night to show her movies and feel her up.
and skinny in a way that parentally aged people usually aren’t.
