The Fault in Our Stars
by John Green
The Fault in Our Stars is one of those books that I first saw in theaters. I know, a mortal sin for a writer. I loved the film, though. A writer buddy of mine encouraged me to read the book as well. So I went right out, bought it, and devoured it in a day. It’s a good book. I hate when people smugly stare down the bridge of their nose and say, “The movie was good, but the book is so much better.” I’m not going to say that. I would recommend them both. I thought both were very well done for their own merits. It’s stuck with me.
“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.”
“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 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.”
“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”
“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.”
“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.”
Sticky Books are those that you just can’t get out of your head. They stick with you long after you have put the book down and have moved on to something else. These are some of my Sticky Books. I don’t enjoy reviewing books myself. I find I am either full of far too much praise for the book because I know how difficult it can be to write a book, or I am far too negative about a book because, well, I guess I was just in a bad mood. So instead of reviews, I have pulled some of my favorite quotes from each Sticky Book.
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