Love the Fault in Our Stars book and want to relive all the best quotes? You’ve come to the right place! Here are the best The Fault in Our Stars Quotes.
The Fault in Our Stars is one of the best teen romance novels, and one of John Green’s finest novels. It’s the story of Hazel and Augustus, two sick teenagers who meet at a cancer kid support group and find love and comfort in each other.
It’s got to be one of the saddest books ever written but it is full of beautiful quotes about love and loss. In my opinion, most of the best John Green book quotes can be found within the pages of The Fault in Our Stars.
Plus, I’ve recorded these quotes from The Fault in Our Stars with page numbers so you can find them easily in your edition too. My book is the standard Penguin UK Books paperback version.
Oh, and if you’re wondering where the title The Fault in Our Stars comes from, that in itself is a reference to another bookish quote. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cassius says:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, for we are underlings.
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
WARNING: The Fault in Our Stars quotes ahead may contain spoilers for those who have not yet read the book.
Though, if you haven’t read The Fault in Our Stars yet, what are you waiting for? You can check my review of The Fault in Our Stars here.
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The Fault in Our Stars Quotes About Love
Obviously, being a teen romance novel, there are lots of quotes about first love in this novel. If I had to pick a favourite quote from Fault in Our Stars, it would be one of these. Probably the one about falling in love being like falling asleep.
“Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.
Chapter 4, p60
Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?”
Maybe ‘okay’ will be our ‘always’.
Chapter 5, p73
But I believe in true love, you know? I don’t believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.
Chapter 5, p75
You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.
Chapter 8, p123
You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you.
Chapter 8, p122
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
Chapter 8, p125
I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure 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’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.
Chapter 10, p153
Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.
Chapter 11, p176
You say you’re not special because the world doesn’t know about you, but that’s an insult to me. I know about you.
Chapter 17, p240
I love you present tense.
Chapter 22, p270
What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.
Chapter 25, p313
The Fault in Our Stars Quotes About Books
Like most book lovers, I love a book quote about books. And there are a few to admire in The Fault in Our Stars.
Neither novels nor their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.
Author’s Note
I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.
Chatper 1, p12
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.
Chapter 2, p33
Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.
Chapter 2, p33
And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.
Chapter 5, p67
That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence.
Chapter 5, p67
Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to
Chapter 7, p111
cross, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.’
Writing does not resurrect. It buries.
Chapter 21, p266
The Fault in Our Stars Quotes About Loss and Grief
Unsurprisingly, some of the best quotes from Fault in our Stars are about loss and grief. It’s astonishing that teenagers would come up with this stuff but I think that shows how a child’s youth can been changed by illness and death.
I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I loved.
Chapter 11
There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.
Chapter 20, p260
The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water’s death with was Augustus Waters.
Chapter 21, p262
The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.
Chapter 21, p262
Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.
Chapter 23, p286
The Fault in Our Stars Quotes About Life and Death
There will come a time 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 built 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 forever. 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.
Chapter 1, p12
It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.
Chapter 1, p20
It’s all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can’t go all the way around.
Chapter 8, p123
The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.
Chapter 10, p139
If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either a life or a death that means anything.
Chapter 11, p168
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
Chapter 12, p189
I thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience.
Chapter 14, p223
We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.
Chapter 25, p312
You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.
Chapter 25, p313
The Fault in Our Stars Quotes About Illness and Pain
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
Chapter 1, p3
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.
Chapter 2, p35
Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but a Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.
Chapter 13, p213
Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.
Chapter 23, p284
The marks humans leave are too often scars.
Chapter 25, p311
Other Fault in Our Stars Quotes
I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what’s cool.
Chapter 3, p40
What a slut time is. She screws everybody.
Chapter 7, p112
The world went on, as it does, without my full participation, and I only woke up from the reverie when someone said my name.
Chapter 9, p131
I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.
Chapter 10, p137
You’re arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that’s a lie, and you know it.
Chapter 10, p145
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.
Chapter 11, p157
I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up.
Chatper 13, p218
I thought of my dad telling me that the universe wants to be noticed but what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us- not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us as individuals.
Chapter 23, p281
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.
Chapter 25, p305
The world wasn’t built for humans, we were built for the world.
Chapter 25, p306
The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.
Chapter 25, p312
Which one of these is your favourite The Fault In Our Stars quote?
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Laura
Editor of What’s Hot?