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 Anthony 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 a 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.
I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.
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.
That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.
All such thoughts were wasted in a life composed of a definitionally finite set of such moments.
When I try to look at you like that, all I see is what I'm going to put you through.
You can't go disappearing on everybody like this, Hazel. You miss too much.
It is the nature of stars to cross.
You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.
There was never enough air in the world, but the shortage was particularly acute in that moment.
I'm not saying it was your fault. I'm saying it wasn't nice.
NOTHING HAS EVER LOOKED LIKE THAT EVER IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY.
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 labour has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll eve have, and I am in love with you.
I could not run or dance or eat foods rich in nitrogen, but in the city of freedom, I was among the most liberated of its residents.
We have bottled all the stars this evening.
The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.
Everyone wants to lead an extraordinary life.
It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
Although it was his dream and not mine, I indulged it. He'd indulged mine, after all.
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.
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.
Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.
It looks like all the hopes we were foolish to hope.
It seemed like forever ago, like we'd had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
It is a good life, Hazel Grace.
It's hard as hell to hold on to your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes.
So much depends upon this observer of the universe.
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.
I am not a mathematician but I know this: There are infinite numbers between ) 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. 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.
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.
You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!
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 accumalating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy.
It seemed to me that I had already seen everything pure and good in the world.
It was sure a privilege to love him.
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.
How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart's bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafes drinking beer, saying their r's and g's in a way I'd never learn.
I missed the future.
Thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and 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.
While the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world.
Little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that was not built for them by navigating a playground that was.
All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.
Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world.
I want to leave a mark.
The marks humans leave are too often scars.
My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.
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 scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad. It's triumphant. It's heroic.
The real heroes aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.
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 to 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.
What else? She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her.
When I try to look at you like that, all I see is what I'm going to put you through.
You can't go disappearing on everybody like this, Hazel. You miss too much.
It is the nature of stars to cross.
You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.
There was never enough air in the world, but the shortage was particularly acute in that moment.
I'm not saying it was your fault. I'm saying it wasn't nice.
NOTHING HAS EVER LOOKED LIKE THAT EVER IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY.
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 labour has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll eve have, and I am in love with you.
I could not run or dance or eat foods rich in nitrogen, but in the city of freedom, I was among the most liberated of its residents.
We have bottled all the stars this evening.
The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.
Everyone wants to lead an extraordinary life.
It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
Although it was his dream and not mine, I indulged it. He'd indulged mine, after all.
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.
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.
Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.
It looks like all the hopes we were foolish to hope.
It seemed like forever ago, like we'd had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
It is a good life, Hazel Grace.
It's hard as hell to hold on to your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes.
So much depends upon this observer of the universe.
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.
I am not a mathematician but I know this: There are infinite numbers between ) 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. 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.
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.
You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!
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 accumalating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy.
It seemed to me that I had already seen everything pure and good in the world.
It was sure a privilege to love him.
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.
How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart's bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafes drinking beer, saying their r's and g's in a way I'd never learn.
I missed the future.
Thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and 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.
While the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world.
Little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that was not built for them by navigating a playground that was.
All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.
Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world.
I want to leave a mark.
The marks humans leave are too often scars.
My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.
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 scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad. It's triumphant. It's heroic.
The real heroes aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.
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 to 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.
What else? She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her.
I love her. I am so lucky to love her. You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.
I do, Augustus. I do.