John Green Quotes (374 Quotes)

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.

And people are moody, dude. You gotta get used to living with people.

Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I'm sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I'm gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you're gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you-they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn't prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

I mean, it's stupid to miss someone you didn't even get along with. But I don't know, it was nice, you know, having someone you could always fight with.

It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.

Scared isn't a good excuse. Scared is the excuse everyone has always used.

They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting.

You smoke to enjoy it, I smoke to die.

Chuck Parson did not participate in organized sports, because to do so would distract from his larger goal of his life: to one day be convicted of murder

If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.

Look at all those cul-de-sacs, the streets that turn in on themselves all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people in their paper houses burning the furniture to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking the beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail.

She waited for me to play out the string, to find the place where she had stopped and was waiting for me, to follow the breadcrumb tail until it dead-ended into her.

Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour - but in face I am that kind of person.

Anyway, that was the last good day I had with Gus until the Last Good Day.

Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.

I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were...miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around.

It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

People always get used to beauty though.

That's the good thing about pain. It demands to be felt.

There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that's one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.