John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"She said she couldn't handle it,’ he told me. ‘I’m about to lose my eyesight and she can’t handle it.’I was thinking about the word handle, and all the unholdable things that get handled. . . .'Well, to be fair,' I said, 'I mean, she probably can't handle it. Neither can you, but she doesn't have to handle it. And you do.''I kept saying “always” to her today, “always always always”, and she just kept talking over me and not saying it back. It was like I was already gone, you know? “Always” was a promise! How can you just break a promise''Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them', I said. Isaac shot me a look. ‘Right, of course. But you keep them anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promises anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?’I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it."
230 Quotes
"She said she couldn't handle it,’ he told me. ‘I’m about to lose my eyesight and she can’t handle it.’I was thinking about the word handle, and all the unholdable things that get handled. . . .'Well, to be fair,' I said, 'I mean, she probably can't handle it. Neither can you, but she doesn't have to handle it. And you do.''I kept saying “always” to her today, “always always always”, and she just kept talking over me and not saying it back. It was like I was already gone, you know? “Always” was a promise! How can you just break a promise''Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them', I said. Isaac shot me a look. ‘Right, of course. But you keep them anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promises anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?’I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"I was surprised. I'd always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasn't dumb."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"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."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
".. the smell of canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r's and g's in a way I'd never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before this recurrance 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 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. That is probably true even if you live to be ninety."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"...there are books...which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"The marks we leave are too often scars."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"Love"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."Augustus," I said again, not knowing what else to say. 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 couldn't say anything 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."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"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."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"Apparently, the world is not a wish-granting factory."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"What can we do" Mom asked again. I shrugged. But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"Fights were recounted, battles won amid wars sure to be lost; hope was clung to; families were both celebrated and denounced; it was agreed that friends just didn't get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"That’s the thing about pain, it demands to be felt."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"Well to be fair, I said, I mean she probably can't handle it. Neither can you, but she doesn't have to handle it. And you do."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt..."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
"The marks humans leave are too often scars."
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
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