Warning: Spoilers

John Green never fails to disappoint me with his books and his writing. 

The Fault in Our Stars is not a tragedy, but it's a heartbreaking story with shocking amounts of humor that seem to tie in so smoothly with the rest of the story. The book is basically about a girl named Hazel Grace Lancaster who has thyroid cancer and lives her life with an oxygen tank and cannula attached to her nostrils. She meets a Augustus Waters, a hot, charismatic, incredibly funny guy who has osteosarcoma. They hit it off immediately, but Hazel refuses to fall in love with Augustus, because his previous girlfriend had died because of brain tumor. She didn't want to put him through the pain again, but in the end, she couldn't stop herself and...fell in love with him. And then the story's all sweet and all, until Augustus tells Hazel that his cancer is acting up again, even though the chances of that is only twenty percent. So now, he has cancer all over his body, and Hazel, despite having the more "serious" disease takes care of him. He dies. The story ends with a letter to Peter Van Houten, an author that Hazel had once admired (until she met him in real life), from Augustus, telling Peter to write Hazel an eulogy, because he knows he wouldn't be able to write one. The last words of the book are "I do," from Hazel's point of view.

I absolutely loved how the fictional book An Imperial Affliction managed to tie the two of them together, and their quest to find out what happened to the characters (since the book ended midsentence, due to the fact that it was a "diary" of a cancerous girl who died while writing it) brings them onto a journey of love. As most of John Green's books go, friendship is heavily emphasized throughout the whole story, for example, the bond between Augustus and his blind friend, Isaac.

It's a beautiful story, really. Probably my favorite book at the moment (and for a long while).

I love the way Augustus always calls Hazel "Hazel Grace" instead of just by her first name. 

Quotes:

"'I fear oblivion,' he said without a moment's pause. 'I fear it like the proerbial blind man who's afraid of the dark.'"

"'There will come a time,' I said, 'when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time where 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 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 a 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.'"

"'Because you're beauiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.'"

"'They don't kill you until you light them,' he said as Mom arrived at the curb. 'And I've never lit one. 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.'"

"'This commitment, however, leads me to wonder: What do you mean by meant? Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortably as possible? What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of the universe, this line of inquiry inevitably reduces us to asking what it means to be human and whether--to borrow a phrase from the angst-encumbered sixteen-year-olds you no double revile--there is a point to it all."

"'I fear your faith has been misplaced--but then, faith usually is.'"

"'I'm like a grenade, Mom. I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow upand I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?'"

"The only solution was to try to unmake the world, to make it black and silent and uninhabited again, to return to the moment before the Big Bang, in the beginning when there was the Word, and to live in that vacuous uncreated space with the Word."

"Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid harmatia: 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 note, 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.'"

"'Off topic, but: What a time is. She screws everybody.'"

"You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not ressurect.'"

"I digress, but here's the rub: The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint."

"You may not find young Hazel's logic persuasive, but I have trod through this vale of tears longer than you, and from where I' sitting, she's not the lunatic."

"'I'm not saying it was your fault. I'm saying it wasn't nice.'"

"The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt."

"'You're arguing that the fragiel, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it.'"

"'I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of deniying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in lovewith 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, but I am in love with you.'"

"It looked like an old painting, but real--everything achingly idyllic in the morning light--and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead."

"'Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in frredom, most people find sin.'"

"But this, too, was a side effect of dying: I could not run or dance or eat foods rich in nitrogen, but in the city of freedom, I was among the most liberated of its residents."

"There were elm trees everywhere along the canals, and these seeds were blowing out of them. But they didn't look like seeds. They looked for all the world like iniaturized rose petals drained of their color. These pale petals were gathering in the wind like flocking birds--thousands of them, like a spring snowstorm."

"...The iepen throw confetti to greet the spring."

"The slight chill in the air was balanced magnificently by the sunshine; on one side of us, cyclists pedaled past--well-dressed men and women on their way home from work, improbably attractive blond girls riding sidesaddle on the back of a friend's bike, tiny helmetless kids bouncing around in plastic seats behind their parents. And on our other side, the canal water was choked with millions of the confetti seeds. Little boats were moored at the brick banks, half full of rainwater, some of them near sinking. A bit further down the canal, I could see houseboats floating on pontoons, and in the middle of the canal, and open-air, flat-bottomed boat decked out with lawn chairs and a portable stereo idled toward us."

"'We have bottled all the stars this evening, my young friends.'"

"One of the others shouted a translation: 'The beautiful couple is beautiful.'"

"'But yes, I believe in Something with a capital S. Always have.'"

"'The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.'"

"'Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.'"

"'It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbably creatures.'"

"'I do not have a drinking problem,' he announced, his voice needlessly loud. 'I have a Cuhrchillian relationship with alcohol: I can crack jokes and govern England and do anything I want to do. Except not drink.'"

"'Rudolf Otto said that if you had not encountered the numinous, if you have not experienced a nonrational encounter with the mysterium tremendum, then his work is not for you.'"

"'That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.'"

"The world is not a wish-granting factory."

"'The negative image of things blown together and then blown apart,' he said."

"Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of the people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell youself 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."

"It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner."

"'I thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience.'"

"'You know what I believe? I remember in college I was taking this math class, this really great math class taught by this tiny old woman. She was talking about fast Fourier transforms and she stopped midsentence and said, "Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed." That's what I believe. 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 eleganve 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."

"'It looks like all the hopes we were foolish to hope.'"

"'See, Isaac, if you just take--we're coming to the curb now--the feeling of legitimacy away from them, if you turn it around so they feel like they are committing a crime by watching--a few more steps--their cars get egged, they'll be confused and scared and worried and they'll just return to their--you'll find the door handle directly in front of you--quietly desperate lives.'"

"'It does not taste like God Himself cooked heaven into a series of five dishes which were then served to you accompanied by several luminous balls of fermented, bubbly plasma while actual and literal flower petals floated down around yuor canal-side dinner table.'"

"Some infinities are bigger than other infinities."

"'Last time, I imagined myself as the kid. This time, the skeleton.'"

"It's hard as hell to hold on to your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your 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."

"So much depends upon this observer of the universe."

"Isaac cleared his throat. 'Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one , or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should have gotten more.'

'Seventeen,' Gus corrected.

'I'm assuming you've got some time, you interrupting bastard.'

'I'm telling you,' Isaac continued, 'Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interrupt you at his own funeral. And he was pretentious: Sweet Jesus Christ, that kid never took a piss without pondering the abundant metaphorical resonances of human waste production. And he was vain: I do not believe I have ever met a more physically attractive person who was more acutely aware of his own physical attractiveness. But I will say this: 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.'

I was kind of crying by then.

'And then, having made my rhetorical point, I will put my robot eyes, because I mean, with robot eyes you can probably see through girls shirts and stuff. Augustus, my friend, Godspeed.'"

"Isaac was still clinging to the lectern. He started to cry. He pressed his forehead down to the podium and I watched his shoulders shake, and then finally, he said, 'Goddamn it, Augustus, editing your own eulogy.'"

"'I will not tell you our love story, because--like all real love stories--it will die with us, as it should.'"

"'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 umbers 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.'"

"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."

"I just wanted to go back to that secret post-terrestrial third space with him that we visited when we talked on the phone. I waited for that feeling, but it never came: The dead air on the line was no comfort, and finally I hung up."

"We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. Augustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer. He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim--as you will be--of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible."

"'You can light these,' I whispered to him. 'I won't mind.'"

"'Augustus Waters was the Mayor of the Secret City of Cancervania, and he is not replaceable,' Isaac began. 'Other people will be able to tell you funny stories about Gus, because he was a funny guy, but let me tell you a serious one: A day after I got my eye cut out, Gus showed up at the hospital. I was blind and heartbroken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, "I have wonderful news!" And I was like, "I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now," and Gus said, "This is wonderful news you want to hear," and I asked him, "Fine, what is it?" and he said, "You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!"' Isaac couldn't go on, or maybe that was all he had written."

"Funerals, I had decided, are for the living."

"'Omnis cellula e cellula,' he said again. '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.'"

"Isaac: 'I dislike living in a world without Augustus Waters.'
 Computer: 'I don't understand--'
 Isaac: 'Me neither. Pause.'"

"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 when Gus told us that he feared oblivion, and I told him that he was fearing something universal and inevitable, and how realy, the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihiism of suffering. I thought of my dad telling me that the universe wants to be noticed. But what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a what happens to us--not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us, as individuals."

"How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart's bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafes drinking beer, saying their r's and g's in a way I'd never learn."

"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."

"Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Peter Van houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children."

"Here's the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That's what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casuaty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease."

"But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, 'They'll remember me now,' but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion."

"My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations."

"Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either."

"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 triumphnat. It's heroic. Isn't that real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm."

"The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention."

"It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She has 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."

"A desert blessing, an ocean curse."

"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."
 

*Not Marble, Nor the Gilded Monuments

*Philippa Foot's Trolley Problem thought experiment

On a side note, I would like to apologize to all my readers for my absence. School has been piling up again, and combined with piano testing, I have nearly no free time. Also, I'm suffering from writer's block and my regular bout of inconfidence. Fear not, however, for I will be back soon (hopefully). Love ya all.