11111100

(ojo, spoilers the Looking for Alaska)



  But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. 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 entirily. 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.
  Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing i learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope i wish i wish i could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself -those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. 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 being and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

Importado the "Looking for Alaska"

11001100

We are as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either.

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

11001011

We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can't stop pissing in fire hydrants. I know it's silly and useless-epically useless in my current state-but I am an animal like any other.

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

11001010

ALERTA - MAS SPOILERS DE "THE FAULT IN OUR STARS"

SALUDITOS

I missed the future. Obviously I knew 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 ocurred 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.
That is probably true even if you live to be ninety-altough I am jealous of the people who get to find out for sure.

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

11001001

ALERTA - SPOILERS DE "THE FAULT IN OUR STARS"

SI SEGUÍS LEYENDO NO ES MI CULPA

SALUDITOS


"We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. Augustus Waters did not die after a lenghty battle with cancer. He died after a lenghty battle with human consciousness, a victim-as you will be-of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible."

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

11001000

"You'll live forever in our hearts, big man."

(That particularly galled me, because it implied the immortality of those left behind: You will live forever in my memory, because I will live forever! I AM YOUR GOD NOW, DEAD BOY! I OWN YOU! Thinking you won't die is yet another side effect of dying.)


Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

11000111

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

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

11000110

"I don't know what I believe, Hazel. I thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience."
[...] "You know what I believe? I remember in college I was takin this math class, this really great math class taught by this tiny old woman. She was talking about fast Fourier transforms and she stopped midsentence and said,'Sometimes it seems the universe just wants to be noticed.'
That's what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased towards conciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?"

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

11000101

"I used to think it would be fun to live on a cloud. [...] But then in middle school science, Mr. Martinez asked who among us had ever fantasized about living in the clouds, and everyone raised their hands. 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. 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 molucules bouncing against each other randomly. Do you worry about who will take care of you if your parent die? As well you should, because they will be worm food in the fullness of time."
"Ignorance is bliss," I said.

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

11000100

"I'm in love with you," he said quietly.
"Augustus," I said.
"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple plesure 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 are all doomed and that there will come a day when all of our labor has been returned to dust, and I know that the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I'm in love with you."

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

11000000

"You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect."

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

10111111

"I am in receipt of your electronic mail dated the 14th of April and duly impressed by the Shakesperean complexity of your tragedy. Everyone in this tale has a rock solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not ne so terribly crossed, but is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong that when he had Cassius note, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves." Easy enough to say when you are a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there's no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars."

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

10111110

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

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

10111101

"All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "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"

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

10111100

[...] I guess I had been looking towards a drawing of an angel with the caption Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?

(This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.)

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

10111011

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's 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.

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

10111010

"So what's your story?" he asked, sitting down next to me at a safe distance.
"I already told you my story. I was diagnosed when    "
"No, not your cancer story. Your story. Interests, hobbies, passions, weird fetishes, etcetera."
"Um," I said.
"Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It's disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking people over business. But surely you haven't let it succeed prematurely."

Importado de "The Fault in our Stars"

10111001

"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 build and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this 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 for ever. 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".

Importado de "The Fault in Our Stars"