I recently finished The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. The book was OK at best. The writing was a little immature for my liking and although there is this youthful conversational overtone to the book, it all felt a little forced to me. A little empty.
There was though some really good lines in the book!
Bookmarked passages:
I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But 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. On the flight home, twenty thousand feet above clouds that were ten thousand feet above the ground, Gus said, "I used to think it would be fun to live on a cloud." "Yeah," I said. "Like it would be like one of those inflatable moonwalk machines, except for always." "But then in middle school science, Mr. Martinez asked who among us had ever fantasized about living in the clouds, and everyone raised their hand. Then Mr. Martinez told us that up in the clouds the wind blew one hundred and fifty miles an hour and the temperature was thirty below zero and there was no oxygen and we'd all die within seconds." "Sounds like a nice guy." "He specialized in the murder of dreams, Hazel Grace, let me tell you. It was unbearable. The whole thing. Every second worse than the last. I just kept thinking about calling him, wondering what would happen, if anyone would answer. In the last weeks, we'd been reduced to spending our time together in recollection, but that was not nothing: The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.((Also, The Epigraph was pretty great:))
As the tide washed in, the Dutch Tulip Man faced the ocean:"Conjoiner rejoinder poisoner concealer revelator. 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