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.
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The Fault in Our Stars
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.
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.
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…
You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.
As his parted lips met mine, I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way.
'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…
The definition of humanness is the opportunity to marvel at the majesty of creation.
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.
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.
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.
I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.
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.
That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.
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.
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…
The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint.
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
But there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.
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.