Rating: 10/10
You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, but you do have some say in who hurts you.
The book is one of my favorite books of all time. 
The Fault in Our Stars will always be close to my heart partly because it’s one of those books that really bumped up my teenage love-thingy emotions. I hate the author, though; he always kills one of the protagonists in his novels. But that’s probably okay. A sage man once told me that real life is unlike books, and I found it right.
It was tragic to read that Hazel was diagnosed with cancer a few months after her first period. The way she narrated it was hilarious, though. The entire novel is a mix of tragic events as well as fun and romantic ones. "Pain demands to be felt," she said. I agree completely. You cannot avoid pain in life. It's supposed to be painful and challenging. Human life is suffering. Take that from a 21-year-old. We can, however, control how we react after tragic events, and Hazel chose to live on!
Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center.
Many people fall in love and manage to find their significant others at various points in their lives. I would call them the lucky ones because there is a considerable chunk of us who aren’t that lucky. A portion of us go through terrible breakups and lose faith in the institute of love altogether. True love is keeping your promise, no matter what comes your way. Like I said before, this sounds too good to be true. People will just leave you when things start getting tough. You must march on.
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that life has become a series of what-ifs. I found myself spending days thinking about the different paths that my life could take. In the end, it did not matter how much I thought of events; things just happened as if they were always meant to happen that way. Too many of us burn away our days worrying about things that we don’t have any control over.
“Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortably as possible?”
Some things in life, like birth, death, pain, heartbreak, etc., are inevitable. No matter how hard you try, you cannot be on top of everything. This sounds like a lot from two teenagers, but it cannot be more accurate if you look at the bigger picture. The world is not a wish-granting factory. I found myself quoting this often to friends and others in different contexts. This is very much true, you cannot get everything you want in life, because we only have one death.
I don’t think I’m in love with anyone, or maybe I am. I don’t know. It’s hard to understand. I re-read the novel about 7 times, and every time I read it, I take away different things from the text. The first time I read it, I wondered if it’s that nice to be in love. I read it a few months back. And I was laughing at how silly kids can be. Just read the quote below, LOL. 
“Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.”
You can think of them as extended book reviews by me.
My book notes differ from traditional book reviews in the sense that I (mostly) do not make recommendations about whether you should read a book.
In addition, where possible, I try to provide anecdotes from my own life to convey why a certain snippet of a book resonated with me.
You can find other book notes here.
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