This book reflects the author’s enchantment to life and death “The search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?"

“What happens...to us...when we die?”

It also exemplify Green’s rhetorical used of metaphors. 

…

Miles also known as Pudge (because of the Colonel’s fondness to irony) loves to read biographies and tend to memorize dying conviction of the one’s he’s reading.

 His living on a context that doesn’t suit him, that’s why he manage to get out by transferring to another school. Here he met new friends and involved on doing reckless things.

His roommate Colonel, is a pure showman. Very courageous one, who dares to meddle by howling ridiculous words on a basketball match of their rivals (he’s not a player though). I love how straightforward he is and at the same time, he’s a trusted friend.

Alaska on the other hand was oftentimes the mastermind of “plan”, oftentimes, a disastrous one. She loath rich kids, that’s why, they’re always her target or at times, doing such “plan” for the joy it brings to her.

Eventhough how very out-going Alaska appears to be, she especially love reading and a certified bibliophile:

“Oh God no. I've maybe read a third of 'em. But I'm going to read them all. I call it my Life's Library. Every summer since I was little, I've gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.”

As the number slowly diminish (in terms of the chronological narration), is the bang explosion of Alaska’s out of the blue aggressiveness to go somewhere and ended up:

“I could try to pretend that I didn't care anymore, but it could never be true again. You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I can't remember, because I never knew.”

“It—just as the Colonel had said at the funeral that she wasn't there, wasn't anywhere. I couldn't honestly imagine her as anything but dead, her body rotting in Vine Station, the rest of her just a ghost alive only in our remembering.”

“Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.”

“I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe “the afterlife” is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled.”

“If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed”

Favorite highlighted passages:

•I learned that myth doesn't mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred.

•Buddhist belief in being present for every facet of your daily life, of being truly present. Be present in this class. And then, when it's over, be present out there.

•I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're gonna do. I'm just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.

•You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”

•Big white whale is a metaphor for everything. You live for pretentious metaphors.

•The miracle, at least in that time and in that place, was that Jesus—a peasant, a Jew, a nobody in an empire ruled exclusively by somebodies—was the son of that God, the all-powerful God of Abraham and Moses. That God's son was not an emperor. Not even a trained rabbi. A peasant and a Jew. A nobody like you. While the Buddha was special because he abandoned his wealth and noble birth to seek enlightenment, Jesus was special because he lacked wealth and noble birth, but inherited the ultimate nobility: King of Kings. 

•Just because they were interesting people doesn't mean I care to hear their musings on nighttime.

•Buddhists are more complicated—because of the Buddha's doctrine of anatta, which basically says that people don't have eternal souls. Instead, they have a bundle of energy, and that bundle of energy is transitory, migrating from one body to another, reincarnating endlessly until it eventually reaches enlightenment.

• I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers—where you just repeat what you've already said with phrases like In summation, and To conclude. I didn't do that—instead I talked about why I thought it was an important question. People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.

•There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow—that, in short, we are all going. We are all going,” McKinley said to his wife, and we sure are. There's your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. Find your way out of that maze.

•But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about. 

•Edgar Allan Poe's last words (for the record: “Lord help my poor soul”)

•There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.

•For she had embodied the Great Perhaps—she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps.

•I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.

•Everything that comes together falls apart.

•Suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.

•Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

Rating: 5/5

...

Hazel Grace is a unique soul who flourish despite her illness, who survived miraculously on the five years of fighting her battle. She’s the one who reminds me of the meaningful existence of vegetarians “I want to minimize the number of deaths I am responsible for.” A certified booknerd who reads a lot of great book with solitary affection to “An Imperial Affliction”, written by Peter Van Houten. I especially admire her frustration on begging for justifiable ending of the story “And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract,” and with the mighty Augustus and the Genies, they both made their way to the residence of Van Houten just to be left with desperate feelings.

Her argument against scrambled egg is a subtle joke:

“I mean, seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it’s a breakfast sandwich.”

“It’s embarrassing that we all just walk through life blindly accepting that scrambled eggs are fundamentally associated with mornings.”

Her upbringing is an influence by her lovable parents’ who are always by her side “You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness”. Furthermore, her cry-baby dad, who at some point his tears warmth my heart “I hated hurting him. Most of the time, I could forget about it, but the inexorable truth is this: They might be glad to have me around, but I was the alpha and the omega of my parents’ suffering.”

The activity that she loath (sharing life tales on a group) led her to know Augustus Waters whom always say “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend,” the extraordinary one who loves to display cigarette between his mouth, not lighting it, the special one for Hazel “You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you”

“That’s why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates an adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”

“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 labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”

His affection was prevalent when out of the blue, they PDA’d at Anne Frank’s museum.

Plus the “as if” humour appearance of venn diagram left by Hazel, what a joke!

Also, I wish Phalanxifor really exist on the world to ease the suffering of those who have lung cancer.

On the other hand, this catchy ad. is the best one I’ve encounter:

“Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It’s all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can’t go all the way around.”

The plot twist is a stimulus for “agape” reaction to me, no wonder Augustus stared at Hazel like gazing a ghost, the first time he saw her, she’s almost a “doppelganger” of his ex!

Plus, who knows who’s the one suffering the severe case here, amid his “happy go lucky” vibe was a paradox puzzle of his “real” state.

“I kind of conned you into believing you were falling in love with a healthy person”

The hospital scene were so heart breaking, even how revolutionary pre-funeral was, and the deteriorating Augustus, it’s.killing.me.

Behind the title:

“Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. We’re she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.”

In my opinion, it’s “The Fault in our Star”, because sickness choose randomly. 

Favourite highlighted passages:

•There will come a time,” I said, “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”—I gestured 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.”

•Home Is Where the Heart Is.

•Good Friends Are Hard to Find and Impossible to Forget 

•True Love Is Born from Hard Times.

• In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life.”

•Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

•Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy? 

•You know, like when you look in the mirror and the thing you see is not the thing as it really is.

•Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible.

•Pain demands to be felt.

•Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,

•A team won a sporting event, but another team lost.

•(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

•The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint.

•We stared at the house for a while. 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. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.

•The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.

•Observation: It would be awesome to fly in a superfast airplane that could chase the sunrise around the world for a while.” “Also I’d live longer.” He looked at me askew. “You know, because of relativity or whatever.” He still looked confused. “We age slower when we move quickly versus standing still. So right now time is passing slower for us than for people on the ground.”

•I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?

•Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we’re disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare, and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about.”

•Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center- how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

•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.”

•The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.’ That’s God, I think, the rising sun, and the light is too bright and her eyes are losing but they aren’t lost.

•I don’t believe we return to haunt or comfort the living or anything, but I think something becomes of us.”

•Sure, I fear earthly oblivion. But, I mean, not to sound like my parents, but I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls. The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won’t be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either a life or a death that means anything.” 

•No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It’s very clever.”

•Dad always told me that you can judge people by the way they treat waiters and assistants.

•Perhaps, but I was under the misguided impression that you were incapable of transatlantic travel. I was trying . . . to provide you some comfort, I suppose, which I should know better than to attempt. But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel . . . it’s ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches.

•What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.”

•Anne Frank’s name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. Four. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around.

•Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but A Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.

•“The world,” he said, “is not a wish-granting factory,”

•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.

•If you go to the Rijksmuseum, which I really wanted to do—but who are we kidding, neither of us can walk through a museum. But anyway, I looked at the collection online before we left. If you were to go, 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.

•“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. You think volcanoes are awesome? Tell that to the ten thousand screaming corpses at Pompeii. You still secretly believe that there is an element of magic to this world? It’s all just soulless molecules bouncing against each other randomly. Ignorance is bliss

•Even cancer isn’t a bad guy really: Cancer just wants to be alive

•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, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, 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.