and I told myself -- as I've told myself before -- that the body shuts down then the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.
How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart__ bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r__ and g__ in a way I__ never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I__ never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can__ make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn__ see it again, and 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.
The Fault in Our Stars
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How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart__ bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r__ and g__ in a way I__ never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I__ never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can__ make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn__ see it again, and 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.
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I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed.
My dad finished chewing something and then put his fork down and looked at me. 'The longer I do my job,' he said. 'the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.''That is really lovely,' my mom said. I liked that they liked each other. 'But isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.''True. Consciousness makes for poor windows, too. I don't think I'd ever thought about it quite that way.
The survivor spoke to us though, or tried to. Mumbling through that matted brown beard of his, pale as death itself. I can__ say now if it was weakness from his wounds or what it was _ but we struggled to understand him. In fact we got nothing intelligible from him at all then. He seemed afraid, like any dying man probably would be, but he did seem more terrified than any dying man I__e seen before _ and I__e seen a few in my time. Let me tell you, Corsair or not, he grabbed whatever hand would hold his, and clenched it so tight his knuckles turned white! He kept fading out as we carried him on the stretcher board the medics brought with them. Looking back, I think he tried to warn us, poor bastard. He tried to tell us to leave him behind and go, but we wouldn__ listen. We thought we were better than the Corsairs, remember? We thought we would be all moral and upright and try to help him. __on__ say I didn__ warn you._ were the last words he said before losing consciousness. At least, those that we could make out. At the end of it all, he was right _ as it turned out, we couldn__ even help ourselves.
I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.
sametimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them