A drink this good deserves one's best posture.
A drink this good deserves one's best posture.
Come over here so I can examine your face with my hands and see deeper into your soul than a sighted person ever could.
I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.
I'll give you my strength if I can have your remission.
Of course I tensed up when he touched me. 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.
Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.
The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
Agustus asked if I wanted to go with him to Support Group, but I was really tired from my busy day of Having Cancer, so I passed.
Don't worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway
I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.
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.
Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.
Take a picture of this so Isaac can see it when they invent robot eyes.
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.
While I did not fancy myself a particularly good person, I never thought my first real sexual action would be prostitutional.
All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.
Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business.
I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.
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.
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.
Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.
The world is not a wish-granting factory.
Writing does not resurrect. It buries.
And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.
Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.
I hadn't read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.
I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?
Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon.
That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.
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 can't know, sweetie, because you've never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.
And so much depends, I told Augustus, upon a blue sky cut open by the branches of the trees above. So much depends upon the transparent G-tube erupting from the gut of the blue-lipped boy. So much depends upon the observer of the universe.
Funerals...are for the living.
I have an Augustus Waters fetish.
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. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.
Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it's worth.
That's part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence
There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.
You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that wasn't made for them by navigating a playground that was.
Anyway, that was the last good day I had with Gus until the Last Good Day.
Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.
I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were...miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around.
It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
People always get used to beauty though.
That's the good thing about pain. It demands to be felt.
There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that's one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because - like all real love stories - it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories