The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.

, The Fault in Our Stars, 2012

Related Quotes

If you were to go [to the Rijksmuseum], and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

— , The Fault in Our Stars, 2012

If the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.

— , The Fault in Our Stars, 2012

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. But, 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.

— , The Fault in Our Stars, 2012

The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives.

— , The Fault in Our Stars, 2012

I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

— , The Fault in Our Stars, 2012