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Page 6: "The only redeeming facet of support Group was this kid named Isaac, a long -faced, skinny guy with straight blond hair swept over one eye. And his eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer."

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Page 9: And yet-- I cut a glance to him, and his eyes were still on me. It occured to me why they called it eye contact.

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Page 7: Me: "If you want me to be a teenager, don't send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs. drink vodka, and take pot." Mom:" You don't take pot, for starters."

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Page 28: Memorial when we were in the thick of it with Gus's treatment," his dad said. "Everybody was so kind. Strong, too, In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life."

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Page 1: "Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)"

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The cylindrical green tank only weighted a few pounds, and I had this little steel cart to wheel it around behind me. It delivered two liters of oxygen to me each minute through a cannula, a transparent tube that split just beneath my neck, wrapped behind my ears and then reunited in my nostrils.

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The contraption was necessary because mu lungs sucked at being lungs.

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I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then said, "I'm not beau--" You're like a millennial Natalie Portman. like V for vendetta Natalie Portman."

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"Someone should tell Jesus," I said. "I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart,"

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I shook me head no. " 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."

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"But you don't even have my phone number, " he said. "I strongly suspect you wrote it in the book." He broke out into that goofy smile. " And you say we don't know each other."

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"They don't kill you unless you light them," He said "And I've never lit one. Its a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing."

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"You choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances..." I said. "Oh yes." He smiled. The big, goofy, real smile." I'm a big believer in metaphor's, Hazel Grace."

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all at once, I couldn't figure out why I was methodically tossing a spherical object through a toroidal object. It seemed like the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing.

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There!" Augustus almost shouted." Hazel Grace, you are the only teenager in America who prefers reading poetry t writing it."

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"It wasn't even that the book was so good or anything; it was just the author, Peter Houten, seemed to understand me in weird and impossible ways. An Imperial Affliction was my book, in the way my body was my body and my thought were my thoughts.

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"Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them." I said. "But you keep the promise anyways. That's what love is. Don't you believe in true love?" I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.

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The trophy smashed against the floor, the plastic basketball player's arm splintering off, still grasping its ball. Isaac stomped on the trophy.

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Augustus stepped toward him and looked down. "Feel better?" He asked. "No" Isaac mumblemed, his chest heaving. "That's the thing about pain," Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. " It demands to be felt."

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"WHAT?!" I shouted aloud. "WHAT IS THIS LIFE?" Mom ran in. "Whats wrong?" "Nothing," I assured her.

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I imagined sitting at a sun- drenched cafe with Peter Van Houten as he leaned across the table on his elbows, speaking in a soft voice so no one else would hear the truth of what happened.

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He'd said he couldn't tell me except in person, and then invited me to Amsterdam. I explained this to Mom, and then said "I have to go."

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I realized while listening to Kaitlyn that I didn't have a premonition of hurting him. I had a postmonition.

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"I think bluie can sleep on the shelf tonight," I said. "Let me remind you that I am more than thirty-three half years old."

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It was really written by him. I licked my finger and dabbed the paper and the ink bled a little, so I knew it was really real.

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"The land seemed sunk into the ocean, little rectangles of green surrounded on all sides by canals. We landed, in fact, parallel to a canal, like there were two runways: one for us and the other for waterfowl."

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"Indiana," he said. "They steal the land from the Indians and leave the name, yes?" "something like that," Mom said.

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The cabbie pulled out into traffic and we headed toward a highway with lots of blue signs featuring double vowels: Oosthuizen, Haarlem.

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"Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center."

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It looked like an old painting, but real-everything achingly idyllic in the morning light--

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I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

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All rooms in the hotel Filosoof were named after filosoofers: Mom and I were staying on the ground floor in the Kierkegaard; Augustus was on the floor above us, in the Heidegger.

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"Some tourists think amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin."

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Mom wanted to go on a walk, but I was supertired, so she got the BIPAP working and placed it snout on me. I hated talking with that thing on.

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"Okay. I'll have fun tonight, okay? I'll go do crazy mom stuff while you and Augustus go to dinner."