Friday, February 27, 2015
Memorable Passage
"My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because like all real love stories, it will die with us. As it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me, because there is no one I'd rather have. I can't talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this. There is an infinite 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 days 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 have me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful"
This passage, from the book "The Fault in Our Stars", was one of my favorite parts of the book. I love the idea of a "little infinity". I hadn't ever really thought about it like that before. I also like the idea of appreciating the time your given instead of dwelling on how little of time it was.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
That book was so rad. I hadn't ever thought of infinities like that before either. I cried like a freaking baby when I read this part of the book. Tears, snot... the whole shebang it was great.
ReplyDeleteI loved that book, too. My favorite quote was Hazel's dad talking about life and death and what comes next: “I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?”
ReplyDelete