The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

there’s a certain unpleasantness to drowning, particularly when it occurs over the course of several months.

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.

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

Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

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

We’re all just side effects, right?” “‘Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness,’”

pain is a blunt and nonspecific diagnostic instrument.

(Off topic, but: What a slut time is. She screws everybody.)

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.

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.

“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”

“what Dom Pérignon said after inventing champagne?” “No?” I said. “He called out to his fellow monks, ‘Come quickly: I am tasting the stars.’

“The world,” he said, “is not a wish-granting factory,”

“If you go to the Rijksmuseum, which I really wanted to do—but who are we kidding, neither of us can walk through a museum. But anyway, I looked at the collection online before we left. If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You’d see Jesus on the cross, and you’d see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you’d see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”

“I don’t know what I believe, Hazel. I thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience.”

‘Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.’

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

So dawn goes down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay.

Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”

the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

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.