Cordelia glared at me. 'I expect if someone strapped you to table an swung an axe over your naked quivering flesh like The Pit and the Pendulum, you'd be correcting his grammar'.
The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.
THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM [all snap flags] Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
...looking up at the stars, he had accepted life as a medium for action. Something to wield like a tool. One’s own life: an instrument for the shaping of the world.
When people see you're happy doing what you're doing, it sort of takes the power away from them to tease you about it.
She's under duress," Peaseblossom said. "I don't care if she's under duress, over it, or alongside it," Moth said. "Nothing in this world supersedes cake.
She was his north star, the fixed point round which his world turned. For as long as his heart beat, or hers, he believed they would always share a destiny.
[I]t 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.
Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
I don't think you're dying," I said. "I think you've just got a touch of cancer. He smiled. Gallows humor.
There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from 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 with a predetermined winner
But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER.
We care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That’s how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too.
Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.
If God rewards us on earth for good deeds—the Old Testament suggests it’s so, and the Puritans certainly believed it—then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones.
Hazel, do you enjoy it?' I paused a second, trying to figure out if my response should be calibrated to please Augustus or his parents. 'Most of the people are really nice,' I finally said.
Who am I to say that these things might nit be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary?
(...) and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water's death was Augustus Water.
