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from "The Fault in Our Stars"

2023.07.31
finished "The Fault in Our Stars" which is a quick enough read but carries some of the weight of the author's "The Anthropocene Reviewed" podcast - the wikipedia page for the book mentions A.J. Jacobs review of Andrew Smith Winger where "In the review, Jacobs coined the term GreenLit, a play on John's surname, Green and the word literature, to describe "realistic stories told by a funny, self-aware teenage narrator", that include, "sharp dialogue, defective authority figures, occasional boozing, unrequited crushes and one or more heartbreaking twists" which is a pretty good combination.

So a brisk if emotionally challenging read... literate and self-aware young adults going through it is a compelling genre.
"Look at it, rising up and rising down, taking everything with it."

"What's that?" I asked.

"Water," the Dutchman said. "Well, and time."
Peter Van Houten, "An Imperial Affliction" (fictional work which also gives the epigraph for "The Fault in Our Stars")
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 [gestures encompassingly] 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.
Hazel Grace Lancaster in John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars"
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago.
(Off topic, but: What a slut time is. She screws everybody.)
Peter Van Houten in John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars"
I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
Hazel Grace Lancaster in John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars"
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.
Amsterdam Cabbie in John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars"
"You get to battle cancer," I said. "That is your battle. And you'll keep fighting," I told him. I hated it when people tried to build me up to prepare for battle, but I did it to him, anyway. "You'll...you'll...live your best life today. This is your war now." I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?

"Some war," he said dismissively. "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 and Hazel Grace Lancaster in John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars"
You know what I believe? I remember in college I was taking this math class, this really great math class taught by this tiny old woman. She was talking about fast Fourier transforms and she stopped midsentence and said, 'Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.'

That's what I believe. 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.
Hazel Lancaster's father in John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars" Later she writes "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."
We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. Augustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer. He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim--as you will be--of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible.
Hazel Grace Lancaster's in a FB comment that gets swept away in al the other comments, "The Fault in Our Stars"
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. [...] I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, "They'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.
Augustus Waters in John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars"
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.
Augustus Waters in John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars"
I've pinpointed the source of the angst and depression I'm feeling today:

RIP Pee Wee Herman!
i should get that arrangement of "saber dance" ive thought about up for my band