Global Panorama

63 Raw & Heartbreaking Quotes From 'The Fault In Our Stars'

"I love you present tense."
Marisa Donnelly
August 6, 2016
“The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint.”
— Peter Van Houten, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Fault, Fault In Our Stars, humanity, Being human, Death, Ending, The Living, Memory, The Dead
“I tried to tell myself that it could be worse, that the world was not a wish-granting factory, that I was living with cancer not dying of it, that I mustn't let it kill me before it kills me, and then I just started muttering stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and over again until the sound unhinged from its meaning. ”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: cancer, Courage, Endurance, Cancer Patients, Pain, sickness, Dying, Dealing With Death
“The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: cancer, Courage, Endurance, Cancer Patients, Pain, sickness, Dying, Dealing With Death, Feeling Pain
“That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: cancer, Courage, Endurance, Cancer Patients, Pain, sickness, Dying, Dealing With Death, Feeling Pain
“You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie and you know it.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: fragility, Being Fragile, rare, Beautiful, Defining Beautiful, My Favorites
“I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.”
— Augustus Waters, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Love, In love, Loving You
“That's God, I think, the rising sun, and the light is too bright and her eyes are losing but they aren't lost. I don't believe we return to haunt or comfort the living or anything, but I think something becomes of us.”
— Augustus Waters, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: After Life, Life After Death, Death, Understanding Death
“I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls. The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won't be able to give anything in exchange for my life.”
— Augustus Waters, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: After Life, Life After Death, Death, Understanding Death, Fear, Fear Of Death, Fear Of Oblivion, Oblivion
“I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I loved.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: fragility, Being Fragile, Death, Life After Death, Dealing With Death
“The definition of humanness is the opportunity to marvel at the majesty of creation.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: humanity, Being human, Creation, Majesty Of Life, Being Alive, My Favorites
“'Augustus Waters,' I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank House, and 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.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Love, Anne Frank House, Anne Frank, Falling In Love, broken, Loving The Broken
“As his parted lips met mine, I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Love, Falling In Love, Kissing, Running Out Of Breath, breathing
“The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body; this cancer-ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Love, Falling In Love, Kissing, Running Out Of Breath, kiss, Cancer Patient, cancer
“You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice. ”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Stories, Telling Stories, Sad Sexual Feels
“The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Art, Philosophy, sickness, Change
“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.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Grief, Dealing With Sickness, Dealing With Death, Death, Illness, cancer
“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, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Grief, Dealing With Sickness, Dealing With Death, Death, Illness, cancer, Love, Love & Relationships
“And then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Grief, Dealing With Sickness, Dealing With Death, Death, Illness, cancer, Pain
“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, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: After Life, Life After Death, Death, Understanding Death, Fear, Fear Of Death, Fear Of Oblivion, Oblivion
“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.”
— Augustus Waters, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: After Life, Life After Death, Death, Understanding Death, Fear, Fear Of Death, Fear Of Oblivion, Oblivion, War, At War With Yourself, cancer
“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward 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 Dad, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Universe, Life, Living, Human Experience, Observations
“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. ”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Love, Love & Relationships, Infinities
“I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, and it should.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Love, Love & Relationships, Infinities, Love Stories, Love & Happiness
“I love you present tense.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Love, Love & Relationships, Infinities, Love Stories
“I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him—that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Death, After Death, Loss, Understanding Death, Losing A Loved One
“I told him that he was fearing something universal and inevitable, and how really, the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaningless of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Death, After Death, Loss, Understanding Death, Losing A Loved One, Suffering, Pain
“I thought of my dad telling me that the universe wants to be noticed. 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, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Death, After Death, Loss, Understanding Death, Losing A Loved One, Suffering, Pain, The Point, purpose, Finding Purpose, Purpose After Death
“I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out my cannula so I could smell better, breathing him in and breathing him out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest burning until I could't distinguish among the pains.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Death, After Death, Loss, Understanding Death, Losing A Loved One, Suffering, Pain
“I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn't get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn't gotten to be a person yet.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Death, After Death, Loss, Understanding Death, Losing A Loved One, Suffering, Pain, Universe, Understanding The Universe, Life
“It occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.”
— Hazel, The Fault in Our Stars
Tagged: Dreams, Dream Come True, humanity, Being human, Human Fault