The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.

I'll fight it. I'll fight it for you. Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I'm okay. I'll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time.

We do an epically bad job of acknowledging one another's work and checking our sources.

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question.../ Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' / Let us go and make our visit"' 'I'm in love with you,' he said quietly.

And so much depends, I told Augustus, upon a blue sky cut open by the branches of the trees above. So much depends upon the transparent G-tube erupting from the gut of the blue-lipped boy. So much depends upon the observer of the universe.

It looked like an old painting, but real - everything achingly idyllic in the morning light - and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

I pulled the oxygen tubes from my nostrils and raised the tube up over my head, handing it to Dad. I wanted it to be just me and just him.