The Fault in Our Stars

If you're on tumblr, you must be familiar with John Green. if you're familiar with John Green, it is impossible for you not to have heard of The Fault in Our Stars. if you have heard of it, it is a lie if this thought never occurs to you: 

"what's up with all the hype? i bet it's overrated. whoever is this writer dude anyway? i bet he's famous just because he's on tumblr. what on earth are these clouds? i bet people love it just because of the quotes. i can write quotes." followed by another thought: 

"the quotes are something, though. this writer dude who's also on youtube seems like a cool fella. i wonder what the book is all about..." and then another thought: 

"I MUST HAVE IT!"

i bought both. next: The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

so yeah, i have it now. and i have read it. if you have ever read my review on any book or movie or tv series, you know better than to continue reading at your own spoiler risk. i enjoy seeing people figuring out the plot twists themselves, but i enjoy writing full reviews freely better.

Augustus Waters. nuff said.

“I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things."

Augustus Waters. you speak beautiful words. you are beautiful. you are an imperfect example of perfection. i love you. why are you fiction though

nobody talks like Augustus Waters in the history of real life, like ever. ok maybe only in the post-Shakespeare-and-Victorian era. which is, sad to say, the era of our generation which in the book Peter Van Houten deeply despised. it's okay if the things he says are cheesy, because he's a fictional character, sadly. fictional characters do what real people don't, so we have the pleasure of imagining it if not experiencing it.

is there still an Augustus living today? they don't exist. or at least, they are a rare species. that's why their beauty and tragedy we can only read on pages of fiction, fantasize in our own imagination. Augustus Waters was never meant to live, not in this world, not in that of Hazel. that's why John Green killed him. bastard.

"I lit up like a Christmas tree, Hazel Grace. The lining of my chest, my left hip, my liver, everywhere."

at this sentence, i started to cry. oh my god how could this happen he was perfect he was healthy he was okay and then all of a sudden, he lit up like a freaking christmas tree

"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 is made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner.” 

and when he died.... i wet my bed. with tears.

'Even cancer isn't a bad guy really: Cancer just wants to be alive.” 

he is a beautiful character. beautiful mind, beautiful face, beautiful sense of humour, beautiful obsession with metaphors. a character which makes me think "i might never meet someone like this. but i am glad enough to have known him." isn't it sad? to feel glad just by reading? as if i am so done with the world to even hope anymore, and instead seek comfort from fictional characters. fall in love with them. because even though it hurts when they die, at least they are never truly alive to begin with. they are never truly capable of truly hurting us, one way or another. of hurting us after they have loved us, or by not loving us at all.

it is better to be the reader, than to be a girl who'll never be loved as much as Augustus loves Hazel. no?

he loves her so much. it pains me to read their love story thinking how maybe, that's all i'd ever know, read.

“All I could think about now, as night fell, was how much you can love made-up people, and how much you can miss them.” 

maybe it doesn't make sense. how Gus can fall in love with Hazel that quickly, how he sees Hazel as extraordinary when she was just being different from others in looks and mind, how he loves her so much than some adults have ever loved anyone. but who cares? they are cancer victims. their days are numbered. they are not normal to begin with, so that's why their story is unusual. who cares?

it's a fiction anyway. *sobs

i've encountered the quotes in the clouds countless times, marveling at the structure of the sweet sentences, the wonder of the wise words, but i've never really understood the meaning, not until i read this book. now a freaking 'okay' can make me swallow back tears and the urge to push John Green off a cliff, before jumping for him with a parachute because that writer dude is just so good. the quotes make sense, they're not just some pretty literary devices. they are relatable, in many aspects of our lives. 

books are my escape from reality, my therapy. but fiction needs to be as real as real life, not just some impossible imagination, fancy fantasy. i prefer serious and sad books. the characters need to go through what we go through. i want to know what they do. life sometimes hurts, so do good books. in The Fault in Our Stars, Augustus Waters died. it hurt, but then it felt good. like when the tears dry you become wiser or something. because that's what life is, isn't it?

i can't agree more. that is what i've always thought about pain. that we hate it, but we linger on it. we choose to listen to heartbreaking songs when we're sad. we choose to remember the memories we want to forget. we choose to cry more when our tears have dried. when actually, we haven't really tried. genuine pain lasts for only a while, after that it's self-inflicted misery. it's an irony. but i guess, it's also symbolic. by feeling pain, we feel alive. by being hurt, we feel real. that we have our own story. that we live our life dramatically. that we're not another useless creature of a boring nature. that we're human. that we have worth.

amen. just, amen

(yeah this is amen as in i hope i'll live and die for a greater good but it's also amen as in this is what i live for it's so true this is like my life motto i'm so in love with you Augustus Waters)

“You say you're not special because the world doesn't know about you, but that's an insult to me. I know about you.” 

'I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing.' ” 

“That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence”

“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.”

“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.”

“Grief does not change you. It reveals you.”

“It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.” 

“Because you’re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beutiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence”

“I love you present tense.” 

i always have this odd desire to fall in love with someone who will.... die. fall fully, completely, irrevocably, irreversibly, even twilight-y in love with someone. even if the price is having him taken away from me after a brief infinity. it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, eh? and the best kind of love which two people not being fated together, is of course, not when the lovebirds can no longer chirp harmonically thus fly their separate sky, but when one of them is brutally shot and fall to the ground.

geddit?

"'But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?' 
I nodded into his shirt.
'Gives you an idea how I feel about you,' he said.
My old man. He always knew just what to say."

like, i want to experience the whole real, true love thing and i want to cry rivers about it later. i don't want to cry because he cheats on me, or leaves me without saying goodbye, or whatever chick-lit novels offer, i want to cry because i know he loves me and doesn't want to leave me but the universe pulls us apart still and swallows him to dust. i want to be happy that if i could jump to the stars i could say hi to Pluto even if it means i will be in pain later when i fall back to the earth and die from falling before my dead body even crash on the solid hard ground. ouch. but at least, i once fly high, right? like Hazel, like Rose 'Dawson', like Snape, like the girl in Remember Me, like whoever else the heroine who loses their hero. like my mother.

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”

but i am selfish.

so i don't want him to be the one i'm going to marry. what's the point of it then? i don't know. just to give me a sense of living. an experience of feeling. because the one i'm going to marry will be the truest love i will ever have and i don't want to live without him, let alone see him die early, i want to be old and grey with him and when i'm wrinkled and ugly he will still call me beautiful (partly because he is senile and sees me as the bride on our wedding day all dolled up, but it's okay). and because if my odd desire ever becomes a reality, it requires my husband to die before me. which is not a way for me to live. i must die before him. if he lives for x days, i live for x-1 days.

this is getting ridiculous.

but i just. want. to. feel. okay? okay.

“You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.”

― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

and i believe, this book is a proof.


“It's just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations.'
'Right, it's primarily his hotness,' I said.
'It can be sort of blinding,' he said.
'It actually did blind our friend Isaac,' I said.
'Terrible tragedy, that. But can I help my own deadly beauty?'
'You cannot.'
'It is my burden, this beautiful face.'
'Not to mention your body.'
'Seriously, don't even get me started on my hot bod. You don't want to see me naked, Dave. Seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace's breath away,' he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.” 

overall, this is not like the best book ever. but it's good enough. ratings always dull the real thing, and maybe that is why this is not 'the best book ever' to me. but it can be one of the best. or it doesn't make a difference at all. the fault is not in the stars, not in us too, but in the universe of nothingness. 

it is certainly a book to remember though, with its intelligent insights on life, revelation of reality, visit to Cancer Town, unpaid parents nursing their sick children, positivity when confronted with mortality, cool blind dude whose loss of sense of sight improves his sense of humour, the ability to still laugh about something to cry about, wisdom words there's no way reading it without having many pages dog-eared, oh and so much more.  it is indeed a tragic tale of love and loss told in a beautiful way.

okay? okay.