To be with him was to hurt him—inevitably. And that's what I'd felt as he reached for me; I'd felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.
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The Fault in Our Stars
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?
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.
My dad understood my cancer the way I did: in the vague and incomplete way people understand electrical circuits and ocean tides.
I believe in true love, you know? I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.
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.
All salvation is temporary.
It always hurt not to breathe like a normal person, incessantly reminding your lungs to be lungs, forcing yourself to accept as unsolvable the clawing scraping inside-out ache of underoxygenation. So I wasn't lying, exactly. I was choosing among truths.
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.
I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of me. I don't even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it.
His every syllable flirted.
You're beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.
There will come a time 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 a…
I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark.
Depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
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.
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.
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.
Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.