Chapter 1
I went to Support Group for the same reason that I'd once allowed nurses with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I wanted to make my parents...
Chapter 2
"Everyone was so kind. Strong, too. In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life." (2.33)
Chapter 3
But three years removed from proper full-time schoolic exposure to my peers, I felt a certain unbridgeable distance between us. I think my school friends wanted to help me through my cancer, but th...
Chapter 4
"Well, to be fair," I said. "I mean, she probably can't handle it. Neither can you, but she doesn't have to handle it. And you do." (4.91)
Chapter 5
It occurred to me that the reason my parents had no money was me. I'd sapped the family savings with Phalanxifor copays, and Mom couldn't work because she had taken on the full-time profession of H...
Chapter 6
"You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can't know, sweetie, because you've never had a baby become a brilli...
Chapter 7
"Well, there's a kid who has hardly left the waiting room since you got here," she said. (7.17)
Chapter 8
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. (...
Chapter 9
"I know what you're trying to do. You don't want to give him something he can't handle. You don't want him to Monica you," he said. (9.53)
Chapter 10
That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people. (10.58)
Chapter 11
"Really?" I asked. I was surprised. I'd always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. (11.94)
Chapter 12
"True," Lidewij said. "I do not know how you go on, without your family. I do not know." As I read […] I thought of Otto Frank not being a father anymore. (12.147)
Chapter 13
[…] and only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn't unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn't want to. (13...
Chapter 14
"Haven't heard from her once," Isaac said. "No cards; no emails. I got this machine that reads me my emails." (14.56)
Chapter 15
Gus's father: "Our children are weird." My dad: "Nicely phrased." (15.13-14)
Chapter 17
"You know," he said after a while, "it's kids' stuff, but I always thought my obituary would be in all the newspapers, that I'd have a story worth telling. I always had this secret suspicion that I...
Chapter 18
But this was the truth, a pitiful boy who desperately wanted not to be pitiful, screaming and crying (18.28)
Chapter 19
I hadn't gotten to know his half sisters, really, but they both hugged me anyway. Julie was sitting on the edge of the bed, talking to a secret Gus in precisely the same voice you would use to tell...
Chapter 20
"But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a...
Chapter 21
I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours whi...
Chapter 22
"It's total bulls***," he said. "The whole thing… He was such a bright kid. It's bulls***. I hate it. But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?" (22.56)