"Some infinities are bigger than other infinities." - John Green
First and foremost, I would want to ask for an apology for taking me almost a couple of months to have this blog for another John Green novel since , you know, the perks of being a school teacher requires me a LOOOOOOOOOT of paper and school works to be done especially that it's March ( yeah, the season of sun kissing and skin tanning, and shades wearing, and beach craving, to sum it all up SUMMER LOVING!)**insert my most excited face here**. But before that, mountainous and tons of paper works must be faced! **insert BIG FROWN HERE** HAHAHAHA
. . .but then, even if March has not come yet and I don't have much to be done, I do my blogs a little late, probably because my very close friend, procrastination, takes its part. ^_*
And our unplanned summer trip occurred,making this blog indeed very late. :D
Anyhow, if you have been following my blogs, I've made mention in my previous one that my sophomore student, Joshua, handed two of his John Green novels not for safe keeping but of course, for reading. Weeks passed and guest what! He decided to give me The Fault in Our Stars since according to him he'd gotten two copies of it. To tell you, after reading this novel I've said to myself, "It was the BEST decision he'd ever made" hahahah! Thank you Josh for giving me the opportunity to be acquainted with such insightful novels. I indeed owe you BIGTIME!!!! ^_^
So much with my gratefulness, here goes the story and some of the lines I found worth reading.
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| ...my instgram photo of the books on the day he Joshua handed me these. |
The story follows the main character, Hazel Grace Lancaster, as she battles cancer. Not only is Hazel trying to live the normal life of a 16-year-old girl, but she is also struggling with what it will be like for her parents after she dies. While Hazel attends a church support group for cancer survivors, she meets a boy that is one year older than her, Augustus Waters. While Augustus had a type of cancer that causes him to lose his leg and wear a prosthetic, it also has a survival rate that is much higher than Hazel's death sentence.
From the first day that Hazel meets Augustus, the two are practically inseparable. The basis of their relationship ends up being Hazel's favorite book, An Imperial Affliction. She requires Augustus to read it and in turn, he requires her to read the book that is the basis of his favorite video game. Hazel relates to the character in her favorite book, Anna, because Anna has a rare blood cancer. Augustus and Hazel bond over the book because both of them of a burning desire to find out how the story ends because the author stops the book before providing conclusion on what happens to each of the characters.
Augustus joins Hazel's pursuit of the book's author, Peter Van Houten, to provide the answers that they need. Augustus even uses a wish foundation to fly him and Hazel to Amsterdam, where the author lives, to talk with him in person. While Hazel is the one that is doomed to die, Augustus ends up telling Hazel that at his recent scan, the doctors discovered that his entire body is filled with cancer. Hazel spends the last months of Augustus's life caring for him and loving him.
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"Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website, or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. Depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying." - Hazel
"Television is a passivity." - Hazel's Mom
"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." - Hazel
"God, grant me the serenity to accept thing I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." - Hazel
"There will come a time when all of us are dead. 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." - Hazel
"Home is where the heart is."
"Good friends are hard to find and impossible to forget."
"Family is forever."
"In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life." - Gus
. . . and the conversation that makes me smirk whenever I read:
Augustus: May I see you again?
Hazel: Sure.
A: Tomorrow?
H: Patience, grasshopper. You don't want to seem overeager.
A: Right, That's why I said tomorrow. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.
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"Without pain, how could we know joy?"
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| Photo from Web |
"All salvation is temporary. I bought them a minute, Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing." - Augustus
"Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them." - Hazel
"But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is.Love is keeping the promise anyway." - Isaac
"Worry is yet another side effect of dying." - Hazel
"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." - Isaac
"Don't worry. Worry is useless."- Hazel
"The symbolic resonances are endless." - Augustus
"Sometimes beautiful people have ugly hands." - Hazel
". . . pain is a blunt and nonspecific diagnostic instrument." - Hazel
". . . the body shuts down when the pain gets too bad." - Hazel
Hazel: You don't always get what you want.
Gus: I'd always thought that the world was a wish-granting factory.
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| from Bard's Fifty-fifth sonnet |
"The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint." - Peter Van Houten
"No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around." - Hazel and Gus
"You've gotta pick your battles in this world." - Gus
"The weird thing about houses is that they almost look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture." Hazel
"Sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people." - Hazel
"Easy comfort isn't comforting." - Hazel
"It would be awesome to fly in a superfast airplane that could chase the sunrise around the world for awhile." - Gus
"Contemporaneity speciaizes in the kind of battles wherein no one loses anything for any value, except arguably their live." - Hazel
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| - Augustus Waters Photo from Web |
" . . . in freedom, most people find sin." - Gus
"People always get used to beauty." - Gus
"If you don't want to live your life in service of any greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good." - Gus
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| - Augustus Waters Photo from Web |
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| - Augustus Waters Photo from Web |
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| - Augustus Waters Photo from Web |
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" . . . you can judge people by the way they treat waiters and assistants." - Hazel
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| - Augustus Waters Photo from Web |
"Some infinities are larger than other infinities."- Hazel
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| -Hazel Grace |
"Ignorance is a bliss."- Hazel
". . . being an adult meant knowing what you believe." - Gus
"I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed." - Gus
"It's hard as hell to hold on to your dignity when the sun is too bright in your losing eyes." - Hazel
. . . Hazel Grace's eulogy:
"My name is Hazel. AugustusWaters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I wont be able to get more than a 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 dies with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me, because there's no one I'd rather have. . .Okay,how not to cry. How am I - okay. Okay.
I can't talk about out 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. Of course, there is a bigger set of infinite 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 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 he world. You gave me forever within my numbered days, and I'm grateful.
"The only person I'd like to talk about Augustus Waters' death was Augustus Waters." - Hazel
"We live in a universe devoted to the creation,and eradication,of awareness."- Hazel
"Writing does not resurrect. It buries."- Van Houten
"Without pain, we couldn't know joy."
"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." - Van Houten
"Dying sucks." - Hazel
". . . the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering." - Hazel
". . .the universe wants to be noticed. But what we want is to be noticed by the universe." - Hazel
"Pain is like a fabric: the stronger it is, the more it's worth." - Van Houten
"Grief does not change you, Hazel.It reveals you." - Van Houten
"Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something." - Hazel
". . .while the world wasn't built for humans,we were built for the world." - Hazel
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| - Augustus Waters |
"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." - Gus
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| -Augusts Waters |
"We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do it either." - Gus
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| -Augustus Waters |
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| - Augustus Waters |
Thank you for visiting and enjoy your summer!
- Cee Brensan ^_^
