We're invisible. I've never been here with someone else. It's different being invisible with someone.

Why don’t we break up? I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do.

But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.

I nodded. I liked Augustus Waters. I really, really, really liked him. I liked the way his story ended with someone else. I liked his voice. I liked that he took existentially fraught free throws. I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointment in the Department of Having a Voice That Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin. And I liked that he had two names. I’ve always liked people with two names, because you get to make up your mind what you call them: Gus or Augustus? Me, I was always just Hazel, univalent Hazel.

We have bottled all the stars this evening, my young friend.

Augustus Waters died eight days after his prefuneral, at Memorial, in the ICU, when the cancer, which was made of him, finally stopped his heart, which was also made of him.

By saying you don’t care if the world falls apart, in some small way you’re saying you want it to stay together, on your own terms.