Il dolore non ti cambia, Hazel. Ti rivela.
But you’re slightly tortured, and the way you’re tortured is sometimes also painful for, like, everyone around you.
Sometimes,” Radar said to me, “he’s so retarded that he becomes kind of brilliant.
Cousin-screwing. It is not totally safe. It raises the risk of birth defects slightly. But I was reading in a book for history that there’s, like, a 99.9999 percent chance that at least one of your great-great-great-grandparents married first cousin.
I use the internet. I just don’t feel a need to, like, contribute to it.
I read to be moved, in every sense of the word, To go to places I haven’t been, and to glimpse worlds I otherwise couldn’t see, including the worlds deep within myself.
Oblivion is inevitable and pain demands to be felt.
It’ll feel better if you reapply the hand sanitizer. Just a couple more times.
Even though I’d never been in love, I knew what it was like to be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated by it, the way my grandmother talked about God being everywhere. When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it.
The question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.
I knew why he hadn’t said anything, of course: the same reason I hadn’t wanted him to see me in the ICU. I couldn’t be mad at him for even a moment, and only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn’t unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn’t want to.
Last night I lay on the frozen ground, staring up at a clear sky only somewhat ruined by light pollution and the fog produced by my own breath – no telescope or anything, just me and the wide-open sky – and I kept thinking about how sky is a singular noun, as if it’s one thing. But the sky isn’t one thing. The sky is everything. And last night, it was enough.
You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.
The river is beautiful because you are looking at it,” she said.
As his parted lips met mine, I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way. The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body; this cancer-ruined thin I’d spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceasless bodliy betrayal of the tumors.
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.′ A brief awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed through: ‘I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything.
You are going to the paper towns. And you are never coming back.
Your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell. Of course, you pretend to be the author. You have to.
So, with Elena, she put gum in my hair on purpose while I was sleeping, and the next morning I was, like, ‘Why is there chewed gum in my hair?’ and she was, like, ‘Ha-ha!’ I was, like, ‘Elena, you have no understanding of humor.
For the record, he who does fear death also dies only once, but whatever.