The world is not a wish-granting factory.
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.
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. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.
It took me a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints and forty minutes to get over that boy.
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. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.
That's the thing about pain...it demands to be felt.
There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.
You get all these friends just when you don't need friends anymore.
At some point, I realized I was Kaitlyning the encounter, so I decided to text Kaitlyn and ask for some advice.
He called out to his fellow monks,'Come quickly I am tasting stars.
I like this world. I like drinking champagne. I like not smoking. I like Dutch people speaking Dutch.
It's almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than it says about either the person I was or the whatever I am now.
People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: Frst, do no harm.
That's what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team up and be this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered.
They were angry, I thought. Horrified. These teenagers, with their hormones, making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.
You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.
At the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.
He puts the killing thing in his mouth but doesn't give it the power to kill him.
I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it.
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 as we hunted for bad guys through the ruins of a city that didn't exist.
She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and 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 that 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.
The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank's name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. FOUR. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around.
We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus...
Your driving is unpleasant, but it isn't technically unsafe.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories