Hiding feelings...

"So what's your story?" he asked, sitting down next to me at a safe distance.
"I already told you my story. I was diagnosed when -"
"No, not your cancer story. Your story. Interests, hobbies, passions, weird fetishes,etcetera."
"Um," I said.
"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.
It occurred to me that perhaps I had. I struggled with how to pitch myself to Augustus Waters, which enthusiasm to embrace, and in the silence that followed it occurred to me that I wasn't very interesting. "I am pretty unextraordinary."
"I reject that out of hand. Think of something you like. The first thing that comes to mind."
"Um. Reading?"
"What do you read?"
"Everything. From, like, hideous romance to pretentious fiction to poetry. Whatever."
"Do you write poetry, too?"
"No. I don't write."
"There!" Augustus almost shouted. "Hazel Grace, you are the only teenager in America who prefers reading poetry to writing it. This tells me so much. You read a lot of capital-G great books, don't you?"
"I guess?"
"What's your favorite?"
"Um," I said.
My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn't like to tell people about it. 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 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.
It wasn't even that the book was so good or anything;it was just that the author, Peter Van Houten, seemed to understand me me in weird and impossible ways. An Imperial Affliction was my book, in a way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts. (Augustus Waters & Hazel Grace Lancaster - pag. 32-34)

(John Green - The fault in our stars - 2012)

* sursa poza AICI