“I told myself that imagining...would not affect the invisible reality going on inside of me, and that therefore all such thoughts were wasted moments in a life composed of a definitionally finite set of such moments.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Thought, Imaginning, Worrying, Overthinking, Moments
“I'm like 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?”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Death, Dying, Impending Death, Illness, cancer
“People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: cancer, Courage, Endurance, Cancer Patients
“But there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.”— John Green, Peter Van Houten, amazon.comTagged: Fault, Fault In Our Stars, humanity, Being human
“You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.”— John Green, Peter Van Houten, amazon.comTagged: Fault, Fault In Our Stars, humanity, Being human, Death
“The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint.”— John Green, Peter Van Houten, amazon.comTagged: Fault, Fault In Our Stars, humanity, Being human, Death
“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 just started muttering stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and over again until the so…”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: cancer, Courage, Endurance, Cancer Patients, Pain
“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.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: fragility, Being Fragile, rare, Beautiful, Defining Beautiful
“I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.”— John Green, Augustus Waters, amazon.comTagged: Love, In love, Loving You
“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.”— John Green, Augustus Waters, amazon.comTagged: After Life, Life After Death, Death, Understanding Death
“I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls. The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won't be able to give anything in exchange for my life.”— John Green, Augustus Waters, amazon.comTagged: After Life, Life After Death, Death, Understanding Death, Fear
“I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I loved.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: fragility, Being Fragile, Death, Life After Death, Dealing With Death
“'Augustus Waters,' I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank House, and thinking that Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Anne Frank House, and that she would probably like nothing more than for her home to have become a place where the young and irre…”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Love, Anne Frank House, Anne Frank, Falling In Love, broken
“The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body; this cancer-ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Love, Falling In Love, Kissing, Running Out Of Breath, kiss
“You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Stories, Telling Stories, Sad Sexual Feels
“The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Art, Philosophy, sickness, Change
“Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. 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…”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Grief, Dealing With Sickness, Dealing With Death, Death, Illness
“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 unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn't want to.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Grief, Dealing With Sickness, Dealing With Death, Death, Illness
“And then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Grief, Dealing With Sickness, Dealing With Death, Death, Illness
“I like this world. I like drinking champagne. I like not smoking. I like the sound of Dutch people speaking Dutch. And now...I don't even get a battle. I don't get a fight.”— John Green, Augustus Waters, amazon.comTagged: After Life, Life After Death, Death, Understanding Death, Fear
“What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me.”— John Green, Augustus Waters, amazon.comTagged: After Life, Life After Death, Death, Understanding Death, Fear
“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it—or my observation of i…”— John Green, Hazel's Dad, amazon.comTagged: Universe, Life, Living, Human Experience, Observations
“You say you're not special because the world doesn't know about you, but that's an insult to me. I know about you.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Love, Love & Relationships, Infinities
“I love you present tense.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Love, Love & Relationships, Infinities, Love Stories
“I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him—that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Death, After Death, Loss, Understanding Death, Losing A Loved One
“I thought of my dad telling me that the universe wants to be noticed. But what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us—not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us, as individuals.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Death, After Death, Loss, Understanding Death, Losing A Loved One
“I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out my cannula so I could smell better, breathing him in and breathing him out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest burning until I could't distinguish among the pains.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Death, After Death, Loss, Understanding Death, Losing A Loved One
“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.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Dreams, Dream Come True, humanity, Being human, Human Fault
“Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That's what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.”— John Green, Augustus Waters, amazon.comTagged: After Life, Life After Death, Death, Understanding Death, Fear
“All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.comTagged: Heaven, Death, Understanding Life, Understanding Death, The Universe