Book Quotes

Favorite Quotes from the Book

** Don't read this if you haven't read the book since it contains major spoilers.**



"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves."


"There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer." - Hazel Grace

"A boy was staring at me. I was quite sure I'd never seen him before. Long and leanly muscular, he dwarfed the molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. Mahogany hair, straight and shirt. He looked my age, maybe a year older, and he sat with his tailbone against the edge of the chair, his posture agressively poor, one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans." - Hazel Grace

“Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.” - Isaac

"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 buy... well." - Hazel Grace

"Finally I decided to stare back. [...] After a while the boy smiled, and then finally his blue eyes glanced away. When he looked back at me, I flicked my eyebrows up to say, I win." - Hazel Grace

"'My name is Augustus Waters,' he said. 'I'm seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I'm just here today at Isaac's request.'" - Augustus Waters

"'Oh, I'm grand.' August Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. 'I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.'" - Augustus Waters

"'I fear oblivion,' he said without a moment's pause. 'I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark.'" - Augustus Waters

"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 tat our species ever did anything. [...] 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." - Hazel Grace

"'Why are you looking at me like that?' Augustus half smiled. '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.'" - Augustus Waters

"It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing between your teeth, but don't give it the power to do its killing." - Augustus Waters

"I'm a big believer in metaphor, Hazel Grace." - Augustus Waters

"'That's the thing about pain,' Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. 'It demands to be felt.'" - Augustus Waters

"'Okay,' he said after forever. 'Maybe okay will be our always.'" - Augustus Waters

"'Oh my god,' Augustus said. 'I can't believe I have a crush on a girl with such cliché wishes.'" - Augustus Waters

“All salvation is temporary,' Augustus shot back. '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 Waters

"'Swing Set Needs Home,'" I said."'Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,'" he said."'Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,'" I said.”  - Hazel & Augustus

"You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you." - Augustus Waters

"You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are." - Augustus Waters

“Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?” - Hazel & Isaac

“I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?” - Hazel Grace

"As he read I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once." - Hazel Grace

"I'm in love with you and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. 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." - Augustus Waters

"Oh I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you." - Augustus Waters

“I spent your Wish on that doucheface,” I said into his chest. “Hazel Grace. No. I will grant you that you did spend my one and only Wish, but you did not spend it on him. You spent it on us.”  - Augstus Waters

"He flashed his crooked smile, then said, 'I lit up like a christmas tree, Hazel Grace. The lining of my chest, my left hip, my liver, everywhere.'" - Augustus Waters

"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." - Hazel Grace

"I'll fight it. I'll fight it for you. Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I'm okay. I'll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time." - Augustus Waters

"I like this world. I like drinking champagne. I like not smoking. I like the sound of Dutch people speaking Dutch. And now... I don't even get a battle. I don't get a fight." - Augustus Waters

"What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner." - Augustus Waters

"[...]because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of." - Augustus Waters

"I started scrolling through the pictures on my phone, a backward flip-book of the last few months, beginning with him and Isaac outside of Monica's house and ending with the first picture I'd taken of him, on the drive to Funky Bones. It seemed like forever ago, like we'd had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities." - Hazel Grace

"'Nostalgia is a side effect of cancer,' I told him. 'Nah, nostalgia is a side effect of dying,' he answered. [...] 'It is a good life, Hazel Grace.'" - Augustus Waters

“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?” - Hazel's father

“It's just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations.'
'Right, it's primarily his hotness,' I said.'It can be sort of blinding,' he said.'It actually did blind our friend Isaac,' I said.'Terrible tragedy, that. But can I help my own deadly beauty?''You cannot.''It is my burden, this beautiful face.''Not to mention your body.''Seriously, don't even get me started on my hot bod. You don't want to see me naked, Dave. Seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace's breath away,' he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.” - Augustus & Hazel

“Where is my chance to be somebody's Peter Van Houten?' He hit the steering wheel weakly, the car honking as he cried. He leaned his head back, looking up. 'I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me fucking die.” - Augustus Waters

“I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up," he said. "And it is my privilege and my responsibility to ride all the way up with you," I said.” - Augustus & Hazel
"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." - Isaac's eulogy

"My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get ore than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell your our love story, because - like all real love stories - it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me, because there's no one I'd rather have... I can't talk about our 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. 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. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful." - Hazel's eulogy

"Augustus Waters died eight days after his prefuneral, at Memorial, in the ICU, when the cancer, which was made of him, finally stopped his heart, which was also made of him." - Hazel Grace

"The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters's death was Augustus Waters." - Hazel Grace

"It was unbearable. The whole thing. Every second was worse than the last." - Hazel Grace

"It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before." - Hazel Grace

"'I love you present tense,' I whispered and then put my hand on the middle of his chest and said, 'It's okay, Gus. It's okay. It is. It's okay, you hear me?'" - Hazel Grace

"I snapped open the clutch, reached in, and pulled out a heard pack of Camel Lights. In a quick motion I hoped no one behind would notice, I snuck them into the space between his side and the coffin's plush silver lining. 'You can light these,' I whispered to him. 'I won't mind.'" - Hazel Grace

"But what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us - not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us, as individuals." - Hazel Grace

"I never quite caught his scent again." - Hazel Grace

"'Would you like to share a memory of Augustus with the group?' - 'I wish I would just die, Patrick. Do you ever wish you would just die?'" - Hazel Grace

"He wasn't perfect or anything. He wasn't your fairy-tale Prince Charming or whatever. He tried to be like that sometimes, but I liked him best when that stuff fell away." - Hazel Grace

"Here's the thing about Hazel: 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. That's what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars." - Augustus' letter

"Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either. People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scare, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic." - Augustus' letter

"[...] I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar." - Augustus' letter

"She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don'T get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do hae so say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers." - Augustus' letter


"I do, Augustus.
I do."