Yesterday I began to write a long dissertation-worthy (and perhaps every bit as yawn-inducing) paragraph about the three books I finished over the weekend. (I am, tragically or miraculously, a serial multi-tasker).

The friend who sent me the quote I posted a while ago had actually never read the book from which it originated. Coincidentally, this book was in my long queue of books to read, and I moved it up. This was one of the books I read last week. I finished it in two sittings, and felt at once this terrible sadness that it was over, and this wonderful luckiness that I had the pleasure of reading it.

The book is not perfect. It's impossibly romantic, in a way that's downright unbelievable. The vocabulary that the teenagers use in the book is awe-strikingly advanced, and the wit sharper than I've ever known wit to be.

I feel akin to those kinds of stories, because I am a very flawed human being, and I've retained an almost pathetic romanticism that weighs me down with constantly unfulfilled expectations as I trod through relationship after relationship. My long-ago studies of SAT words have left me with an insatiable love for looking up words I don't know the meaning of, and I fall to pieces over the kind of rare sophisticated wit that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Anyway. Some quotes:

"... and then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness."

"It occurred 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."

"And of course, if you ever do decide to write anything else, even if you don't want to publish it, I'd love to read it. Frankly, I'd read your grocery lists."

"But of course there is always a hamartia."

"Pain demands to be felt.:"

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

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

All quotes from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.