Passage #1: (pg 3)

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. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)

Passage #2: (pg. 10)

“There will come a time,” I said , “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”— I gestured encompassingly—“ 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.”

This passage is more wordy, but very important. Hazel talks a lot about death and the inevitability of it. Like I said, it's a common theme in the book. It's a very existential crisis-y point of view, one I think everyone experiences every now and then. The only thing that bugs me about this is that it's very... flowery language for a sixteen year old to have said on the spot. Either this was a slight mishap on John Green's part, or Hazel has been saving this speech and perfecting it for a long time. Thoughts?