"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 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 a 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 what everyone else does."

I liked the way his story ended with someone else. I liked his voice.

Sometimes you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy? (This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.)

"...as if it were a crime to mention death to the dying."

I think my school friends wanted to help me through my cancer, but they eventually found our that they couldn't. For one thing, there was no through.

So, I wasn't lying exactly. I was just choosing among truths.

All salvation is temporary.

"I mean, she probably can't handle it. Neither can you but she doesn't have to handle it. And you do."

"Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them."

"Love is keeping the promise anyway."

"That's the thing about pain," Augustus said, and then glanced back at me." It demands to be felt."

"And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract."

It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence.

"meant a great deal to you" What do you mean by meant? 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? What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of the universe, this line of inquiry inevitably reduces us to asking what it means to be human and whether - to borrow the phrase from the angst-encumbered sixteen-year-olds you no doubt revile - there is a point to it all.

"Say your life broke down. The last good kiss You had was years ago."

I almost felt like he was there in the room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.

"But I believe in true love, you know? I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does."

So maybe you have this premonition that there is something fundamentally incompatible and you're preempting the preemption.

But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves." (Shakespeare)

"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; But you shall shine more bright in these contents Then unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time." (Sonnet 55, Shakespeare)

What a slut time is. She screws everybody.

I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.

The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.

"You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it."

Easy comfort isn't comforting.

"Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare, and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-Five about."

"Let us go then, you and I When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table. Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question... Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and make our visit."

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.

"Do you know what Dom Perignon said after inventing champagne? - Come quickly: I am tasting the stars."

People always get used to beauty, though.

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By the sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Til human voices wake us, and we drown." (Prufrock)

The shirt was a screen print of a famous Surrealist artwork by Rene Magritte in which he drew a pipe and then beneath it wrote in cursive Ceci n'est pas une pipe. (This is not a pipe.) "It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever."

"For who so firm that cannot be seduced?" (Shakespeare)

"I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendos, the blackbird whistling Or just after."

I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it - or my observation of it - is temporary?

Even cancer isn't a bad guy really: Cancer just wants to be alive.

There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

But Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.

Writing does not resurrect. It buries.

So dawn goes to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay.

But what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us - not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us, as individuals.

Who am I to say that these things are not forever?

My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.

You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.