Here’s what’s not beautiful about it: from here, you can’t see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.
But it doesn’t say that dude shall not fall in love with dude, because that’s just impossible, right? The gays are animals, answering their animal desires. It’s impossible for animals to fall in love. And yet-.
That’s how I remember things, anyway. I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don’t fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don’t see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.
But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in.
Margo menyukai misteri sejak dulu. Dan dalam semua hal yang terjadi setelahnya, aku tidak pernah bisa berhenti berpikir bahwa jangan-jangan lantaran terlampau menyukai misteri, dia pun menjadi misteri.
My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn’t like to tell people about it. 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 a betrayal.
I took his hand, and part of me wanted to tell him I loved him, but I wasn’t sure if I really did. Our hearts were broken in the same places. That’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.
I lit up like a Christmas tree, Hazel Grace. The lining of my chest, my left hip, my liver, everywhere.
Religion is important whether or not we believed in one, in the same way historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.
Dude, pillows don’t break. Try something that breaks.
Adolescent sanity is so twentieth century.
Those seem to be the two choices, everything else is just killing time.
How do you look for someone who announces she won’t be found, who always leaves clues that lead nowhere, who runs away constantly? You can’t!
You lie there, not even thinking really, except to try to consider how to describe the hurt, as if finding the language for it might bring it up out of you. If you can make something real, if you can see it and smell it and touch it, then you can kill it.
There are always answers, Pudge.
Van Houten nodded and said, “Did you close the deal with that chick yet?” Whereupon I encountered for the first and only time a truly speechless Augustus Waters. “I,” he started, “um, I, Hazel, um. Well.” “This boy appears to have some kind of developmental delay,” Peter Van Houten said to Lidewij.
You are buying into the cross-stitched sentiments of your parents’ throw pillows.
But then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.” Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside someone else.
Das Leben ist Sehnsucht.
Let me give you some advice: let her come home. I mean, at some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too.