The Fault In Our Stars

by John Green

• made-up stories can matter

• devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death
• But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
• Almost everything is, really.
• how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn't die.
• slowly working his way toward a master's degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago
• Thyroid originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs. And I'm doing okay.
• everyone talking about fighting and battling and winning and shrinking and scanning.
• he let us talk about dying, too.

• The contraption was necessary because my lungs sucked at being lungs.
• I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies.
• And yet -  I cut a glance to him, and his eyes were still on me.
• It occurred to me why they call it eye contact.
• God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
• "There's nothing you can do about it."
• "I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend."
• Fights were recounted, battles won amid wars sure to be lost; hope was clung to; families were both celebrated and denounced; it was agreed that friends just didn't get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered.

• "I fear oblivion," he said without a moment's pause. "I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark."
• "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 was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be a time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."
• Peter Van Houten was the only person I'd ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it's like to be dying, and (b) not have died.
• "Goddamn," Augustus said quietly. "Aren't you something else."

• "Someone should tell Jesus," I said. "I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart."
• "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 in oblivion and everything."
• "You're like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie Portman." "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."
• The senses must feast while there is yet hunger and whatever.
• I'm trying to observe young love in its many-splendored awkwardness.
• "Yes, it's difficult to ascertain whether he is trying to arouse her or perform a breast exam."
• I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of me.
• You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.
• You choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances.

• He sighed in a way that made me wonder whether he was confident about the existence of someday.
• It was, we were told, incurable.
• They've got this drug that makes you not feel so completely terrified about the fact that you can't breathe.
• 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 I remember wanting not to be awake.
• I painted the rosiest possible picture, embellishing the miraculousness of the miracle.
• Home Is Where The Heart Is
• Good Friends Are Hard to Find and Impossible to Forget
• True Love Is Born from Hard Times
• Family Is Forever
• In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life.
• "I want to minimize the number of deaths I am responsible for."
• weird and wonderful
• 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.
• An Imperial Affliction was my book, in the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts.
• Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?
• "Right, that's why I said tomorrow," he said. "I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.

• as if it were a crime to mention death to the dying.
• "I'd sooner die," I assured her.
• I think my school friends wanted to help me through cancer, but they eventually found out that they shouldn't. For one thing, there was no through.
• But as a reader, I did not despair.
• 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.
• I couldn't wait forever.
• there was always this great moment when he would throw me up in the air, just toss me away from him, and I would reach out my arms as I flew and he would reach out his arms, and then we would both see that our arms were not going to touch and no one was going to catch me, and it would kind of scare the shit out of both of us in the best possible way, and then I would legs-failingy hit the water and then come up for air uninjured and the current would bring me back to him as I said again, Daddy, again.
• Tears streamed down his reddened cheeks in a continual flow, his face a taut mask of pain.
• Not even the slightest hint that he was aware of my existence.
• "Pain demands to be felt."
• "All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing."
• He nodded, 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.
• "Some people don't understand the promises they're making someone when they make them"
• But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?
• If true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.
• there's something a little worrisome in your eyes.
• "That's the thing about pain," Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. "It demands to be felt."

• Nothing to be gained by worrying between now and then.
• I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.
• Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortable as possible?
• "Caroline is no longer suffering from personhood."
• "We're all just side effects, right?"
• "Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness," I said, quoting AIA.
• And then the line was quiet, but not dead. 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.
• Come over here so I can examine your face with my hands and see deeper into your soul than a sighted person ever could.
• "But I believe in true love, you know? I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes and not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last as long as your life does."
• I fear your faith has been misplaced - but then, faith usually is.
• I could hear his crooked smile.
• If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be my flowers.
• Don't worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway.
• "One of the many benefits of not smoking is that packs of cigarettes last forever."

• the invisible reality going on inside of me, and that therefore all such thoughts were wasted moments in life composed of a definitionally finite set of such moments. I even tried to tell myself to live my best life today.
• pain is a blunt and nonspecific diagnostic instrument.
• "I'm like. Like. I'm a grenade, Mom. I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?"
• "I'm a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you; you're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay? I'm not depressed. I don't need to get out more. And I can't be a regular teenager, because I'm a grenade."
• To be with him was to hurt him - inevitably.
• I told myself that the body shuts down when the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.
• There was nothing to do: Screaming made it worse.
• The only solution was to try to unmake the world, to make it black and silent and uninhabited again.
• But make no mistake. In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.
• "This is just a thing, Hazel," my mom said. "It's a thing we can live with."
• Each sleep ended to reveal a person who seemed a bit more like me.
• I worked hard to met his eyes, even though they were the kind of pretty that's hard to look at.
• It doesn't matter. You don't always get what you want.
• "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves."
• but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.
• "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; / But you shall shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttiest time."
• What a slut time is. She screws everybody.
• When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.
• You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
• "I shall say you will die and none will remember you."
• The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint.
• but I have trod through this vale of tears longer than you, and from where I'm sitting, she's not the lunatic.

• They might be glad to have me around, but I was the alpha and the omega of my parents' suffering.
• I tried to tell myself that it could be worse, that the world was not a wish-granting factory, that I was living with cancer not dying of it, that I mustn't let it kill me before it kills me, and then I jut started muttering stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and over again until the sound unhinged from its meaning. I was still saying it when he called back.
• "All efforts to save me from you will fail."
• You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.
• I took a deep breath through my nose. There was never enough air in the world, but the shortage was particularly acute in that moment.
• No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.
• As he read, I fell in love with the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
• "Keep your shit together," I whispered to my lungs.
• The world went on, as it does, without my full participation, and I only woke up from the reverie when someone said my name.
• "You've gotta pick your battles in this world, Hazel," my mom said. "But if this is the issue you want to champion, we will stand behind you."
• We stared at the house for a while. 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.
• The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.
• Her primary reason for living and my primary reason for living were awfully entangled.
• "It's embarrassing that we all just walk through life blindly accepting that scrambled eggs are fundamentally associated with mornings,"
• The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.
• I didn't want to look at them, so I looked away, and to look away was to look at Augustus.
• "You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it."
• "Easy comfort isn't comforting. You were a rare and fragile flower once. You remember."
• His enthusiasm was adorable. I couldn't resist leaning over to kiss him on the cheek.
• The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.

• "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simpler 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."
• It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back.

• And in freedom, most people find sin.
• but in the city of freedom, I was among the most liberated of its residents.
• "People always get used to beauty, though."
• Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
• "Stupid human voices always ruining everything."
• The sun was a toddler insistently reducing to go to bed.
• I think forever is an incorrect concept.
• 'The sun too bright in her losing eyes.' That's God, I think, the rising sun, and the light is too bright and her eyes are losing but they aren't lost. I don't believe we return to haunt or comfort the living or anything, but I think something becomes of us.
• "But you fear oblivion."
• The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won't be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything.
• "It's really mean of you to say that the only lives that matter are the ones that are lived for something or die for something. That's a really mean thing to say to me."
• A sequel that will exist just for us.
• I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died.
• the definition of humanness is the opportunity to marvel at the majesty of creation or whatever.
• she had no filter between her thoughts and her speech, which was sad and unpleasant and frequently hurtful.
• "Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. 't would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you."

• The important thing is not whatever nonsense the voices are saying, but what the voices are feeling, Surely you know that there are only two emotions, love and fear.
• Apparently the world is not a wish-granting factory.
• feeling like a ghost that both comforts and haunts.
• my brain was telling my lungs it's okay it's okay calm down it's okay and my lungs telling my brain oh, God, we're dying here.
• "Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon."
• As his parted lips met mine, I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way. The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body.
• "Some infinities are larger than other infinities."

• You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.
• But God, was it beautiful.
• You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but A Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.
• I couldn't be mad at him for even a moment, and only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn't unloved Augustus Waters. And I didn't want to.
• the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness.
• "I'll fight it. I'll fight it for you. Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I'm okay. I'll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time."
• because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor is dying of.
• "I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up," he said. "And it is my privilege and my responsibility to ride all the way up with you," I said. "Would it be absolutely ludicrous to try to make out?" "There is no try, there is only do."

• "I used to think it would be fun to live on a cloud."
• You still secretly believe that there is an element of magic to this world? It's all just soulless molecules bouncing against each other randomly. So you worry about who will take care of you if your parents die?
• "Ignorance is bliss."
• 'Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.'
• "I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed."
• all the hopes we were foolish to hope.
• It seemed like forever ago, like we'd had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
• Nostalgia is a side effect of dying.
• It's hard as hell to hold on to your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes, and that's what I was thinking about

• "Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he hads a heart a figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should have gotten more. Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interrupt you at his own funeral…But I will say this: when the scientists of the future show up  at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists too screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him."
• "My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears, Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because - like all real stories - it will die with us, as it should…I can't talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: here are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There is 0.1 and 0.12 and 0.112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are larger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more number than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful."

• The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters' death was Augustus Waters.
• Every second worse than the last.
• 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.
• 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 face up on the water, undrowned.
• I just wanted to go back to that secret post-terrestrial third space with him that revisited when we talked on the phone. I waited for that feeling, but it never came.
• Thinking you won't die is yet another side effect of dying.
• I was mad at the universe.
• He died after a lengthy battle of human consciousness, a victim - as you will be - of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible.
• Writing does not resurrect. It buries.
• and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.
• Funerals, I decided, are for the living.
• but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again.
• "All cells come from cells. Every cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life begets life begets life begets life begets life."
• Waking up was horrible, because for a disoriented moment I felt like everything was fine, and then it crushed me anew.
• It seemed to me that I had already seen everything pure and gold in the world, and I was beginning to suspect that even if death didn't get in the way, the kind of love that Augustus and I share could never last.
• So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
• 'Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it's worth.'
• "My daughter. Suffered beautifully. Will never be beatified."
• Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.
• "I had to tell her. I had to tell her she would die, so I told her she was going to heaven. She asked if I would be there, and I said I would not, not yet. But eventually, she said, and I promised that yes, of course, very soon. Twenty-two years ago."
• "Heaven needed an angel."

• it is possible to live with pain.
• and it occurred to me that 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.
• while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world.
• The marks humans leave are too often scars.
• My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.
• We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths.
• We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do it either.
• The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.
• I tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.
• You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.
• I do, Augustus. I do.