I'm here to bring you through some important passages from chapters 6 through 10 of The Fault in Our Stars. :)

Passages I found interesting/symbolic/important:

Then I found myself worrying I would have to make out with him to get to Amsterdam, which is not the kind of thing you want to be thinking, because (a) It shouldn't've even been a question whether I wanted to kiss him, and (b) Kissing someone so you can get a free trip is perilously close to full-on hooking, and I have to confess that while I did not fancy myself a particularly good person, I never thought that my first real sexual action would be prostitutional.

 This reveals so much about Hazel's character. Her low self esteem is show in the last sentence and her constant worry prevails.

Funny quote to break the tension!

"Oh, my God. I've seen him at parties. The things I would do to that boy. I mean, not now that I know you're interested in him. But, oh, sweet holy Lord, I would ride that one-legged pony all the way around the corral."

No commentary needed on this one. It's just thrown in for laughs. :)

"I'm like. Like. I'm a grenade, Mom. I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?"

My dad tilted his head a little to the side, like a scolded puppy.

"I'm a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you; you're too invested, so please just let me do that, okay? I'm not depressed. I don't need to get out more. And I can't be a regular teenager, because I'm a grenade."

This shows more about Hazel's character and her fear of letting people down. It's foreshadowing, but maybe not in the way we expect.

On Tuesday, they told me I'd go home on Wednesday. On Wednesday, two minimally supervised medical students removed my chest tube, which felt like getting stabbed in reverse and generally didn't go very well, so they decided I'd have to stay until Thursday. I was beginning to think that I was the subject of some existentialist experiment in permanently delayed gratification when Dr. Maria showed up on Friday morning, sniffed around me for a minute, and told me I was good to go."

This provides a lot of insight into much of Hazel's life so far.

Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves." Easy enough to say when you're a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.

This is where the book gets its title. :)

 It's not that I had some utterly poignant, well-lit memory of a healthy father pushing a healthy child and the child saying higher higher higher or some other metaphorically resonant moment. The swing set was just sitting there, abandoned, the two little swings hanging still and sad from a grayed plank of wood, the outline of the seats like a kid's drawing of a smile.

Hazel's depression seeps through here. She insists that she is not depressed, but she so clearly is, especially in this passage.

 Twelve-year-old leukemic Michael had passed away. He'd fought hard, Lida told me, as if there was another way to fight. Everyone else was still around. Ken was NEC after radiation. Lucas had relapsed, and she said it with a sad smile and a little shrug, the way you might say an alcoholic had relapsed.

The day to day life of cancer patients is depressing.

"Kinda," I said. But it wasn't that. The truth was, I didn't want to Isaac him. "to be fair to Monica," I said, "what you did to her wasn't very nice either." 

 "What'd I do to her?" he asked, defensive?

 "You know, going blind and everything." 

 "But that's not my fault," Isaac said.

 "I'm not saying it was your fault. I'm just saying it wasn't nice."

This is funny, but in a very morbid way.

"I'm in love with you," he said quietly. 

 "Augustus," I said.

 "I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "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."

Please think and comment about this quote below - what it means for the plot, for Augustus's character, and for Hazel's character as well as for their relationship.

(not so) Happy reading!
Kathy