The Fault in Our Stars is a now world beloved book by John Green of two terminally ill people trying to stretch infinity into the finite. Green's tale of Hazel and Augustus, which was inspired by Green's time working in a hospital, finding loving embrace in the face of death and pain is guarantee to bring both tears and determination to any reader with a heart. All of the quotes presented here lay bare the heartbreaking and inspiring moments that give focus on what a life well lived means.
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.
The marks humans leave are too often scars.
I’m so excited I can barely breath!
I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.
I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance 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?
Hello. My name is Hazel Grace Lancaster. And Augustus Waters was the star-crossed love of my life. Ours is an epic love story and I probably won’t be able to get more than a sentence out without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Like all real love stories, ours will die with us, as it should. You know, I’d kind of hoped that he’d be the one eulogizing me, because there is really no one else… Yeah, no, um… I’m not gonna talk about our love story, ’cause I can’t. So instead I’m gonna talk about math. I’m not a mathematician, but I do know this: There are infinite numbers between zero and one. There’s point one, point one two, point one one two, and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger set of infinite numbers between zero and two or between zero and a million.
The only thing worse than biting it from cancer is having a kid bite it from cancer.
I’m like. Like. I’m like a grenade, Mom. I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?
I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.
You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!
Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.
Augustus Waters talked so much that he’d interupt 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.
I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.
Mr. Van Houten. I’m a good person, but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person, but a good writer. I think we’d make a good team. I don’t wanna ask you for any favors, but if you have the time – and from what I saw you had plenty – please fix this for me: It’s a eulogy for Hazel. She asked me to write one, and I’m trying, but I just… I could use a little flair. See, the thing is… we all wanna be remembered. But Hazel’s different. Hazel knows the truth. She didn’t want a million admirers, she just wanted one. And she got it. Maybe she wasn’t loved widely, but she was loved deeply. And isn’t that more than most of us get? When Hazel was sick, I knew I was dying, but I didn’t wanna say so. She was in the ICU when I snuck in for ten minutes and I just sat with her before I got caught. Her eyes were closed, her skin pale, but her hands were still her hands, still warm, and her nails were painted this dark blue black color, and… I just held them. And I willed myself to imagine a world without us and what a worthless world that would be. She’s so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she’s smarter than you, ’cause you know she is. She’s funny without ever being mean. I love her. God, I love her, I’m so lucky to love her, Van Houten.
You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you. All efforts to save me from you will fail.
You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.
Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself 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.
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.
But I believe in true love, you know? I don’t believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.
Even thou you have freaking cancer, you are willing to give money to corporation for a chance to acquire even more cancer? Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? SUCKS. Totally disappointing. Totally.
Some people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them.
Guys, I think we should wait until dark.
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.
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.”
Maybe okay will be our always.
I want to see you again tonight. But I’m willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.
You say you’re not special because the world doesn’t know about you, but that’s an insult to me. I know about you.
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.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why you care so much about your silly questions?
We may not look like much, but between us, are five legs, four eyes and two and a half working pair of lungs. But we also have two dozen eggs. So, I suggest you go back inside.
You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world… but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.
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.
You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.
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 resent 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.
You are a side effect of an evolutionary process that cares little for individual lives. You are a failed experiment in mutation.
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
Ok, lungs, you keep your sh*t together for one week.
Oh my God, I’m flying. Oh my God, we’re flying. We’re-we’re flying! Look down! Nothing has ever looked like this in all of human history!
Books so special and rare and your that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.
It is the nature of stars to cross.
That’s the thing about pain…It demands to be felt.
I love you present tense.
I am mad! I’m mad because I think you’re special. And isn’t that enough? You think that the only way to lead a meaningful life, is for everyone to remember you. For everyone to love you! Guess what, Gus – this is your life! This is all you get! You get me, and you get your family and you get this world, and that’s it! And if that’s not enough for you, then I’m sorry, but its not nothing. Because I love you. And I’m going to remember you.
Dude, I’m not deaf, I’m just blind, so I can hear when you make fun of my disability.
Hello, ma’am. Your daughter, she’s done a great injustice, so we’ve come here seeking revenge. You see, we may not look like much, but between the three of us we have five legs, four eyes and two and a half pairs of working lungs, but we also have two dozen eggs, so if I were you, I would go back inside.
Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.
“Augustus Waters,” I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank House, and then thinking that Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Anne Frank House, and that she would probably like nothing more than for her home to have become a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love.
The important thing is not what nonsense the voices are saying… but what the voices are feeling.
Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.
The world is not a wish-granting factory.
What a slut time is. She screws everybody.
Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon.
Funerals, I’ve decided, are not for the dead. They are for the living.
Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing b*st*rd. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, 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’ve gotten more.
They don’t kill you unless you light them. 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. A metaphor.
Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.
I don’t want to see a world without Augustus Waters in it.
That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence.
There is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.
That’s why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates a adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.
But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.
Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
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.
It was unbearable… The whole thing. Every second, worse than the last. One of the first things they ask you in the ER is to rate your pain on a scale from one to ten. I’ve been asked this question hundreds of times. And I remember once when I couldn’t catch my breath and it felt like my chest was on fire, the nurse asked me to rate my pain. Though I couldn’t speak, I held up nine fingers. Later, when I started feeling better, the nurse came in and called me a fighter. “You know how I know?” she said. “You called a ten a nine.” But that wasn’t the truth. I didn’t call it a nine because I was brave. The reason I called it a nine was because I was saving my ten. And this was it… This was the great and terrible ten.
My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constelations.
All your attempts to save yourself from me will fail.
You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.
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