How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease." (2.70)
Is it possible to separate yourself from your disease? Do Hazel, Augustus, and Isaac identify completely with cancer?
Quote #2
I understood: No wasting good lungs on a hopeless case. (8.14)
Can your identity be controlled by those around you? Hazel's well-meaning doctors see her as a "hopeless case," so does that make her feel more like one?
Quote #3
"Hazel is such an inspiration to me […] She just keeps fighting the battle, waking up every morning and going to war without complaint. She's so strong. She's so much stronger than I am. I just wish I had her strength." (9.14)
Well, what else would you do if you had cancer? Ignore it? Give in to it? Hazel hates this kind of rhetoric and finds it condescending.
Quote #4
[…] but then I heard a voice that was definitely a twisted version of his say, "BECAUSE IT IS MY LIFE, MOM. IT BELONGS TO ME." (10.19)
Augustus is not defined by his cancer, and he won't let it prevent him from doing the things he wants to do. He even passes over chemo drugs in order to go to Amsterdam and fulfill some wishes. Brave or stupid?
Quote #5
"Everyone wants to lead an extraordinary life."
"Not everyone," I said, unable to disguise my annoyance. (11.101-102)
Truth, as brought to us by the worldly and wise teens of The Fault in Our Stars. Hazel and Augustus have completely different views on how they want to be remembered in the future.
Quote #6
"Yeah. I mean, it was the tumor. It ate her brain, you know? Or it wasn't the tumor. I have no way of knowing, because they were inseparable, she and the tumor." (11.145)
Augustus' ex-girlfriend was a total jerk to him, but he had no idea if it was the tumor speaking. Cancer can creep into your life and take over to the point where you can't distinguish where you end and the cancer begins.
Quote #7
Augustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses. (12.41)
Being an Improbable Creature requires having a pretty strong sense of self, don't you think?
Quote #8
According to Maslow, I was stuck on the second level of the pyramid, unable to feel secure in my health and therefore unable to reach for love and respect and art and whatever else, which is, of course, utter horses*** (13.23)
Sometimes philosophers totally don't have it right. Hazel can reach for love if she wants to, even with the cancer eating away at her insides.
Quote #9
"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 was special." (17.8)
Augustus isn't trying to be arrogant—he just desperately wants to fulfill what he thought he was going to be in life.