WARNING: You may be highly at risk of getting too emotional while reading this book that you'll literally feel drained after you finish it. I advise you to have a box of tissue beside you and I request you to stay in your room so you won't get unsolicited and weird stares from people around you. Pleas stay in a secluded area.
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
"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."
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Because you're beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence."
"Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them."
"That's the thing about pain, it demands to be felt."
"No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around."
"Contemporaneity specializes in the kind of battles where in no one loses anything of any value, except arguable their lives."
"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."
"It's hard as hell to hold on to your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes."
"My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. 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, because there's no one I'd rather have. I can't talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: 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 meant 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."
***
Omnis cellula e cellula. All cells come from cells. Every cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life begets life begets life begets life begets life.
"The voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought everything might be done better and again."
"The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things: the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention."
"I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough reason 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."
***
"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. 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."Rating: 5/5
Labels: Book Review, John Green