Quotes: The Fault in Our Star by John Green

Rainy nights make me want to cuddle up in bed and just read. And tonight I’m particularly incline revisiting the sweet and painful story of Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters from John Green‘s The Fault in our Stars. When I first read the book on the day it was released, I am so full of emotions that I never tried reviewing the book. I accepted the fact that there is no way I’ll be able to write my thoughts and feelings about the story and my reading experience. There’s no way I can justify John Green’s greatness and The Fault in our Stars perfections. Not when I first read the book, not tonight and not in the near future. Though tonight I want to share some beautiful, poignant and emotional quotes from the book. Lines that makes me ponder, realize and feel.

LOVE

“I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.”

“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.”

“Some people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.

“Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.”

“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.”

PAIN & DYING

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”

“Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.”

“That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It demands to be felt.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”

“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.”

“You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.”

“We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.”

PLACES

“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

BOOKS

“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.”

LIFE & EVERYTHING ELSE

“There will come a time,” I said, “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”—I gestured encompassingly—“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.”

“The real heroes anyways aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.”

“There is no try,” I said. “There is only do.”

“You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”

“My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.”

“There is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.”