Augustus Quotes

“Tell me my copy is missing the last twenty pages or something.

Hazel Grace, tell me I have not reached the end of this book.

OH MY GOD DO THEY GET MARRIED OR NOT OH MY GOD WHAT IS THIS?!”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You used," he said, and then took a sharp breath, "to call me Augustus.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“He shook his head, just looking at me.
- "What?" I asked.
- "Nothing" he said.
- "Why are you looking at me like that?"
Augustus half smiled. "Because you`re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence." A brief awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed through: "I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything."
I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then said, "I`m not beau-"
- "You are like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie Portman."
- "Never seen it."
- "Really?" he asked. "Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can`t help but fall for a boy she knows is trouble. It`s your autobiography, so far as I can tell."
His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn`t even know that guys could turn me on - not, like, in real life.”
― John Green The Fault in Our Stars

“I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“It lit up like a Christmas Tree Hazel Grace...”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes
are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn't actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn't get smallpox.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Well," Peter Van Houten said, extending his hand to me. "It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures." I shook his swollen hand, and then he shook hands with Augustus. I was wondering what ontologically meant. Regardless, I liked it. Augustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“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.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business—and I wanted to try to reflect that.”
― John Green

“Mankind in the aggregate I have found to be brutish, ignorant and unkind, whether those qualities were covered by the coarse tunic of the peasant of the white and purple toga of a senator. And yet in the weakest of men, in moments when they are alone and themselves, I have found veins of strength like gold in decaying rock; in the cruelest of men, flashes of tenderness and compassion; and in the vainest of men, moments of simplicity and grace.”
― John Williams, Augustus

“After I finished, there was quite a long period of silence as I watched a smile spread all the way across Augustus’s face—not the little crooked smile of the boy trying to be sexy while he stared at me, but his real smile, too big for his face. “Goddamn,” Augustus said quietly. “Aren’t you something else.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Why are you looking at me like that?"
Augustus half smiled. "Because you`re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“What?" I asked.
"Nothing," he said.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
Augustus half smiled. "Because you're beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.”
― John Green

“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.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Fault in Our Stars

“He walked over to Isaac and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Dude, pillows don’t break. Try something that breaks.”
Isaac reached for a basketball trophy from the shelf above the bed and then held it over his head as if waiting for permission.
“Yes,” Augustus said. “Yes!” The trophy smashed against the floor, the plastic basketball player’s arm splintering off, still grasping its ball. Isaac stomped on the trophy.
“Yes!” Augustus said. “Get it!” And then back to me, “I’ve been looking for a way to tell my father that I actually sort of hate basketball, and I think we’ve found it.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“As quick as boiled asparagus!”
― Robert Graves

“I had come to Rome in chains, but I would leave Rome a queen.”
― Stephanie Dray, Lily of the Nile

“When you fear nothing, you have nothing to fear”
― S.F. Chandler, We the Great Are Misthought

“Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It's disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven't let it succeed prematurely.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“His excitement was adorable. I couldn't resist. I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. -Hazel Grace Lancaster, The Fault In Our Stars”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“But this was the truth, a pitiful boy who desperately wanted not to be pitiful, screaming and crying, poisoned by an infected G-tube that kept him alive, but not alive enough.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Democracy, indeed, has a fair-appearing name and conveys the impression of bringing equal rights to all through equal laws, but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them, section 2and if even this seems to some a difficult feat, it is quite inevitable that the other alternative should be acknowledged to be impossible; for it does not belong to the majority of men to acquire virtue. And again, even though a base man should obtain supreme power, yet he is preferable to the masses of like character, as the history of the Greeks and barbarians and of the Romans themselves proves. section 3For successes have always been greater and more frequent in the case both of cities and of individuals under kings than under popular rule, and disasters do not happen so frequently under monarchies as under mob-rule. Indeed, if ever there has been a prosperous democracy, it has in any case been at its best for only a brief period, so long, that is, as the people had neither the numbers nor the strength sufficient to cause insolence to spring up among them as the result of good fortune or jealousy as the result of ambition.”
― Cassius Dio, The Roman History: The Reign of Augustus

“For fortune having hitherto seconded him in his designs, made him resolute and firm in his opinions, and the boldness of his temper raised a sort of passion in him for surmounting difficulties; as if it were not enough to be always victorious in the field, unless places and seasons and nature herself submitted to him.”
― Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives: Volume II

“About this time he had the sarcophagus and body of Alexander the Great brought forth from its shrine, and after gazing on it, showed his respect by placing upon it a golden crown and strewing it with flowers; and being then asked whether he wished to see the tomb of the Ptolemies as well, he replied, "My wish was to see a king, not corpses.”
― Suetonius, Augustus

“Vielleicht finden es manche schade, dass sie weniger Narben hinterlässt, dass sich weniger Leute an sie erinnern, dass sie zwar tief geliebt wurde, aber nicht von vielen. Aber es ist nicht traurig, ...”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Acta est fabula, plaudite”
― Emperor Augustus last words

“And yet in the weakest of men, in moments when they are alone and themselves, I have found veins of strength like gold in decaying rock; and in the cruelest of men flashes of tenderness and compassion; and in the vainest of men moments of simplicity and grace. I remember Marcus Aemilius Lepidus at Messina, an old man stripped of his title, whom I made publicly to ask forgiveness for his crimes and beg for his life; after he had done so in front of the troops he had once commanded, he looked at me for a long moment without shame or regret or fear, and smiled, and turned from me and strode erectly toward his obscurity. And at Actium, I remember Marcus Antonius at the prow of his ship looking at Cleopatra as her own fleet departed leaving him to certain defeat, knowing at that moment that she had never loved him; and yet upon his face was an expression almost womanly in its wise affection and forgiveness. And I remember Cicero , when at last he knew that his foolish intrigues had failed, and when in secret I informed him that his life was in danger. He smiled as if there had been no strife between us and said, "Do not trouble yourself. I am an old man. Whatever mistakes I have made, I have loved my country." I am told that he offered his neck to his executioner with that same grace.”
― John Edward Williams, Augustus: A Novel by Williams, John Edward

“Six times during my life has this tomb of my soul led me to the brink of that eternal darkness into which all men sink at last, and six times it has stepped back, as if at the behest of a destiny it could not overmaster”
― John Williams

“Six times during my life has this tomb of my soul led me to the brink of that eternal darkness into which all men sink at last, and six times has it stepped back, as if at the behest of a destiny it could not overmaster.”
― John Williams