John Green Quotes (374 Quotes)

She loved mysteries so much that she became one.

Those of us who frequent the band room have long suspected that Becca maintains her lovely figure by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished children.

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business.

I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.

I'll fight it. I'll fight it for you. Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I'm okay. I'll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time.

Only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn't unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn't want to.

Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.

The world is not a wish-granting factory.

Writing does not resurrect. It buries.

And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I've been smart longer.

Don't you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don't love the crazy, sullen bitch.

I have guts, just not when it counts.

In those fifty, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I'd never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.

People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going.

You can't just make me different, and the leave. Because I was fine before.

But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.

I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself to train my body for real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.

Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.

She never acted as if she liked him all that much, but then she never acted as if she liked anyone all that much.

To be abandoned like that! Shut out when you most need to be loved.

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.

Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

I hadn't read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.

I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?

Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon.

That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.

The world went on, as it does, without my full participation, and I only woke up from the reverie when someone said my name.

You can't know, sweetie, because you've never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.

And it was just the three of us - three bodies and two people - the three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us too much keeping us from one another.

Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

I may die young, but at least I'll die smart.

Is it so hard to die, Mr. Lewis? Is that labyrinth really worse than this one?

Reading it the night before, I'd wondered if it would be like that for me-if in one moment, I would finally understand her, know her, and understand the role I'd played in her dying. But I wasn't convinced enlightenment struck like lightining.

There's your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. Find your way out of that maze.

You just use the future to escape the present.

But once that string gets cut, kid, you can't uncut it. Do you get what I'm saying?

I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.

Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future.

She spoke quietly then, the tiniest crack in her voice, and all at once Lacey Pemerton was not Lacey Pemberton. She was just-like, a person.

Tonight, darling, we are going to right a lot of wrongs. And we are going to wrong some rights. The first shall be last; the last shall be first; the meek shall do some earth-inheriting. But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.

And so much depends, I told Augustus, upon a blue sky cut open by the branches of the trees above. So much depends upon the transparent G-tube erupting from the gut of the blue-lipped boy. So much depends upon the observer of the universe.

Funerals...are for the living.

I have an Augustus Waters fetish.

It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.

Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it's worth.

That's part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence

There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.

You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that wasn't made for them by navigating a playground that was.