If  all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, then John Green’s authorship of The Fault in Our Stars has been my muse and excuse for arriving late for curtain call.  This is my first experience with Green’s ability to transform my surroundings from white walls to deliciously radiant hues of adjectives and original word play.

While I dabble with the art of writing, the lyrical styling in which he fashions meaning from phrases and sentences is the craft.  It would not be appropriate to lionize such a work by sharing my opinion of the plot as, “my thoughts are stars I cat fathom into constellations;”  rather I will put on a gallery walk of the more effective and resonating verbiage found throughout The Fault in Our Stars  that have imprinted on me.

 ”So I wasn’t exactly lying.  I was just choosing among truths”

*

” ‘Some people don’t understand that promises they’re making when they’re making them,’ I said.

‘But you keep the promise anyway.  That’s what love is.  Love is keeping the promise anyway,’ “

*

“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.”

*

“Hazel has developed an issue with the ghettoization of scrambled eggs…Maybe scrambled eggs are ghettoized, but they’re also special.  They have a place and a time, like church does.”

*

“Easy comfort isn’t comforting.”

*

“I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls.”

*

“I was staring, but I wasn’t yearning, if you know what I mean.”

*

“…no longer suffering from personhood.”

*

” ‘Okay,’ he said after forever.

‘Maybe okay will be our always.’

‘Okay,” I said.

It was Augustus who finally hung up.”

*

“It seemed like forever ago, like we’d had this brief but still infinite forever.  Some infinities are bigger than other infinites.”

*

We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.”

*

“I love you present tense.”