| — | Augustus Waters, The Fault In Our Stars (via meelimonster) |
| — | John Green (The Fault in Our Stars) |
| — | John Green, The Fault in Our Stars (via hicetnunc17) |
When you go into the ER, one of the first things they ask you to do is rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and from there they decide which drugs to use and how quickly to use them. I’d been asked this question hundreds of times over the years, and I remember once early on when I couldn’t get my breath and it felt like my chest was on fire, flames licking the inside of my ribs fighting for a way to burn out of my body, my parents took me to the ER. A nurse asked me about the pain, and I couldn’t even speak, so I held up nine fingers.
Later, after they’d given me something, the nurse came in and she was kind of stroking my head while she took my blood pressure and said, “You know how I know you’re a fighter? You called a ten a nine.”
But that wasn’t quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten.
And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.
| — | John Green, The Fault in Our Stars (via bertallamas) |
| — | The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (via mercurialkings) |
Warning: The links contain some spoilers.
Okay, so this one I’m hugely proud of. It’s full of references. There’s the cigarette, obviously. Notice, however, that it is unlit. The smoke is actually made of the shadows of tree branches on snow. Note also the wedding ring and the “victory” brand name. The best part, however, is probably the window. It’s a picture of an actual tree from Amsterdam that Anne Frank wrote about in her diary. Best of all, it died in part from decaying from the inside out. (It’s like tree cancer!) Talk about metaphorical resonances.
You can see a larger version of you view the post on my blog and either click on the image itself or right-click on it to open in a new tab. Select “Open link in new tab” though, not “Open image in new tab.”
