Finished "The Fault In Our Stars" two days ago. A really nice and different book. A perfectly imperfect story line. I've not watched its movie adaptation yet. Here are some of the heart touching and memorable quotes from the book.
Book: The Fault In Our Stars
Author: John Green
Edition: 2013 Penguin Books
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1) "There will come a time", I said, "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" - I gestured encompassingly - "will have been for naught. May be 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".
2) "All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that brings them an hour, which is the hour that brings them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing."
3) Pain demands to be felt.
4) 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 old you no doubt revile - there is a point to it all.
5) People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked, and stabbed and poisoned for years, and I still trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.
6) You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.
7) One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It's all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.
8) He laughed it off. "The thing about dead people." He said, and then stopped himself. "The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them, but the truth is...complicated I guess."
9) That's what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased towards consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of the history, to tell the universe that it - or my observation of it - is temporary.
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A brilliant book canvassing the side effects of life and death. A story of two imperfect kids with enough time, liberty and tact at their disposal to ponder over universal metaphysics. A fictional tragedy with realistic and almost comic narrative. The book revolves very much around a fictional book "An Imperial Affliction". The title of this fictional book itself is chosen so figuratively that it justifies "the fault in our stars."
Emily Dickinson's poem from which the line "The Imperial Affliction" comes:
There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.
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