Ever since I read The Fault in Our Stars, John Green's YA novel about a teenage girl with cancer, a few years ago, hardly a month goes by without the novel's signature line coming to mind: "The world is not a wish-granting factory." That's a great line because it is both true and well-expressed. Reconciling ourselves to the indifference of the world to our desires is a struggle as ancient as the Greeks. They expressed it as the wheel of fate, and it's been expressed a zillion times since. Yet this quote makes you feel it anew, acutely and even beautifully. How does it do that?
John Green proves that great writing doesn't have to be elaborate. But elaborate can be beautiful, as one of my other favorite quotes, by Virginia Woolf, demonstrates: "The beauty of this world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder." While John Green's line is forceful, Woolf's is subtle. And precise: Has the exact nature of life—how completely its wonderfulness and its tragic nature are interwoven—ever been so exactly conveyed?
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