1. “When you’re as charming and physically attractive as myself, it’s easy enough to win over people you meet. But getting strangers to love you…now, that’s the trick.”
2. “I was thinking about the word handle and all the unholdable things that got handled.”
3. “Don’t worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway”
4. “It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”
5. “It seemed like forever ago, like we’ve had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
6. “But 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.”
7. “People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I have been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on.”
8. “The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.”
9. “I don’t think you’re dying,” I said. “I think you’ve just got a touch of cancer.
He smiled. Gallows humor.”
10. “Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”
11. “There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”
12. “Good friends are hard to find and impossible to forget.”
13. “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.”
14. “Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them.”
15. “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 mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.”
16. “Augustus,” I said. “Really. You don’t have to do this.”
“Sure I do,” he said. “I found my Wish.”
“God, you’re the best,” I told him.
“I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel,” he answered.”
17. “My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life.”
18. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.”
19. “The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.”
20. “The world is not a wish-granting factory.”
21. “The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.”
22. “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.”
23. “What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”
24. “I’m a grenade,” I said again. “I just want to stay away from people and read books and think.”
25. “I didn’t want to look at them, so I looked away, and to look away was to look at Augustus.”
26. “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 it—is temporary?”
27. “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.”
28. “May I see you again?” he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in his voice.
I smiled. “Sure.”
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“Patience, grasshopper,” I counseled. “You don’t want to seem overeager.
“Right, that’s why I said tomorrow,” he said. “I want to see you again tonight. But I’m willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m serious,” he said.
“You don’t even know me,” I said. I grabbed the book from the center console. “How about I call you when I finish this?”
“But you don’t even have my phone number,” he said.
“I strongly suspect you wrote it in this book.”
He broke out into that goofy smile. “And you say we don’t know each other.”
29. “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.”
30. “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. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal.”
31. “It’s all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can’t go all the way around.”
32. “Sometimes the Universe wants to be noticed.”
33. “You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.”
34. “Nothing,” I said. “I’m just…” I couldn’t finish the sentence, didn’t know how to. “I’m just very, very fond of you.”
35. “Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”
36. “‘When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him.’”
37. “The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water’s death with was Augustus Waters.”
38. “Oh, my god,” Augustus said. “I can’t believe I have a crush on a girl with such cliche wishes.”
“I was thirteen,” I said again, although of course I was only thinking “crush crush crush crush crush”. I was flattered but changed the subject immediately.”
39. “As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
40. “Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
41. “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.”
42. “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”
43. “All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.”
44. “He’s not that smart.”
“She’s right,” Augustus says. “It’s just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations.”
“Right, it’s primarily his hotness.”
“It can be sort of blinding,” he said.
“It actually did blind our friend Isaac.”
“Terrible tragedy, that. But can I help my own deadly beauty?”
“You cannot.”
“It is my burden, this beautiful face.”
“Not to mention your body.”
“Seriously, don’t even get me started on my hot bod. You don’t want to see me naked, Dave. Seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace’s breath away,” he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.”
45. “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 and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. 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. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
46. “Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.”
47. “I hated hurting him. Most of the time, I could forget about it, but the inexorable truth is this: They might be glad to have me around, but I was the alpha and the omega of my parents’ suffering.”
48. “I went to Support Group for the same reason that I’d once allowed nurses with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I wanted to make my parents happy.”
49. “And then there are books…so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal.”
50. “The kiss lasted forever as Otto Frank kept talking from behind me. “And my conclusion is,” he said, “since I had been in very good terms with Anne, that most parents don’t know really their children.”
51. “Everyone was so kind. Strong, too. In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life.”
52. “That’s why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates a adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”
53. “We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?”
54. “What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.”
55. “But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”
56. “Ma’am,” Augustus said, nodding toward her, “Your daughter’s car has just been deservingly egged by a blind man. Please close the door and go back inside or we’ll be forced to call the police.”
57. “Above us, the wind blew and the branching shadows rearranged themselves on our skin. Gus squeezed my hand. “It is a good life, Hazel Grace.”
58. “I’m in love with you,” he said quietly.
“Augustus,” I said.
“I am,” he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. 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.”
59. “Anyway, that was the last good day I had with Gus until the Last Good Day.”
60. “I can be pretty blind to other people’s feelings.”
61. “I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what’s cool.”
62. “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.”
63. “I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.”
64. “Without pain, how could we know joy?’ This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”
65. “Augustus nodded at the screen. ‘Pain demands to be felt,’ he said, which was a line from An Imperial Affliction.”
66. “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.”
67. “The world wasn’t built for humans, we were built for the world.”
68. “I’m not saying it was your fault. I’m saying it wasn’t nice.”
69. “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.”
70. “You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you.”
71. “You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”
72. “I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”
73. “It occurred to me that the reason my parents had no money was me. I’d sapped the family savings with Phalanxifor copays, and Mom couldn’t work because she had taken on the full-time profession of Hovering Over Me.”
74. “What’s that?”
“The laundry basket?”
“No, next to it.”
“I don’t see anything next to it.”
“It’s my last shred of dignity. It’s very small.”
75. “I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.”
76. “You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”
77. “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.”
78. “You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.”
79. “Funerals…are for the living.”
80. “He responded a few minutes later.
Okay.
I wrote back.
Okay.
He responded:
Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!”
81. “Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
82. “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.”
83. “You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. 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.”
84. “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
85. “There is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.”
86. “Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”
87. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. 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.”
88. “He really was beautiful. I know boys aren’t supposed to be, but he was.”
89. “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.”
90. “Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”
91. “The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
92. “Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon.”
93. “The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, there was no longer anyone to remember with.”
94. “You couldn’t be more wrong,” I said. “You are buying into the cross-stitched sentiments of your parents’ throw pillows. 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.”
“You’re a hard person to comfort,” Augustus said.
“Easy comfort isn’t comforting,” I said.”
95. “I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I’d never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can’t make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and 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.”
96. “If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either a life or a death that means anything.”
97. “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: First, do no harm.”
98. “There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came. His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. “My name is Augustus Waters,” he said. “I’m seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I’m just here today at Isaac’s request.”
“And how are you feeling?” asked Patrick.
“Oh, I’m grand.” Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.”
99. “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.”
100. “Apparently, the world is not a wish-granting factory.”
101. “If the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
102. “I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity”
103. “You’ll live forever in our hearts, big man.
That particularly galled me, because it implied the immortality of those left behind: You will live forever in my memory, because I will live forever! I AM YOUR GOD NOW, DEAD BOY! I OWN YOU!”
104. “You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”
105. “I love you present tense.”
106. “I do, Augustus. I do.”
107. “Maybe ‘okay’ will be our ‘always’.”
108. “Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.”
109. “We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.”
110. “Writing does not resurrect. It buries.”
111. “You get all these friends just when you don’t need friends anymore.”
112. “I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it.”
113. “All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.”
