John Green Quotes

If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

I don't suppose I can wear the flamingo tie," he said as he pulled on black socks. "It's a bit festive, given the occasion," I responded. "Can't wear it to the opera," said the Colonel, almost smiling. "Can't wear it to a funeral. Can't use it to hang myself. It's a bit useless, as ties go." I gave him a tie.

History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that they’re processes – that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today; just as today, we are making subtle, irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember as revolutions.

Suffering is universal.

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

Abligurition: an actual, if very obscure, English word, which means the spending of too much money on food.

This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

Just spend a few more months playing video games. That hand-eye coordination will come in handy when you get to third base.

Truth resists simplicity.

One of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.

Patience, grasshopper," I counseled. "You don't want to seem overeager." "Right, that's why I said tomorrow," he said. "I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.

The whole thing was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic

Random questions are the least random of all questions.

It is a good life, Hazel Grace.

"Please stop," I said. "You're upsetting the black Santas."

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

You could drive past it without noticing and from what I understand, you ought to.

Youth is counted sweetest by those who are no longer young.

So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be seen. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved.

I think teenagers bring a lot of intellectual sophistication. They're wrestling with big questions. It's just that, a lot of times they do that separately from adults.

My interest as a writer is not in reflecting actual human speech, which, of course, does not occur in sentences and is totally undiagrammable. My interest is in trying to reflect the reality of experience - how we feel when we talk to each other, how we feel when we're engaging with questions that interest us.

I was a fairly shy person - not the hand raising type.

I'm not sure if I'm depressed. I mean, I'm not exactly sad. But I'm not exactly happy either. I can laugh and joke and smile during the day, But sometimes when I'm alone at night I forget how to feel.

Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character, and passions, his mistakes, and weaknesses."--Democritus An Abundance of Katherines---John Green

I think that it's a universal urge to have our pain not be felt alone and to have our joys not be felt alone.

Before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard.

…because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff… Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.

Radar revs the engine as to say hustle, and we are running through the parking lot, Ben's robe flowing in the wind so that he looks vaguely like a dark wizard, except that his pale skinny legs are visible, and his arms hug plastic bags. I can see the back of Lacey's legs beneath her dress, her calves tight in midstride. I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.

I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going.

People thought he was a glutton for punishment, that he liked getting dumped. But it wasn't like that. He could just never see anything coming, and as he lay on the solid, uneven ground with Hassan pressing too hard on his forehead, Colin Singleton's distance from his glasses made him realize the problem: myopia. He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

Breaking up isn't something that gets done to you; its something that happens with you.

I love you present tense,” I whispered, and then put my hand on the middle of his chest and said, “It’s okay, Gus. It’s okay. It is. It’s okay, you hear me?” I had—and have—absolutely no confidence that he could hear me. I leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.

The Venn Diagram of boys who don’t like smart girls and boys you don’t wanna date is a circle.

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

What can we do?" Mom asked again. I shrugged. But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.

Like all sick children,' he answered dispassionately, 'you say you don't want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.

What about the rest of your life?" She shrugged. "What about it?" "Aren't you worried about, like, forever?" "Forever is composed of nows," she says.

Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.

All the characters are made out of words. With reading, I understand that the people aren't real but the fact that they are made out of language and are made out of words is extremely powerful to me. It becomes transformative for me. Different people have different ways of trying to make stories using language.

But I could always tell in her eyes if she got really pissed at me, and her eyes were still pretty smiley

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

Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest.

We can't love our neighbors till we know how crooked their hearts are.

it is the nature of stars to cross

I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I loved.

It was not an eventful day. I should have done extraordinary things. I should have sucked the marrow out of life. But on that day, I slept eighteen hours out of a possible twenty-four.

Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good—and amazingly underutilized—resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences.

me: you know what sucks about love? o.w.g.: what? me: that it's so tied to the truth. I know it sucks, but in a way, it's good....Love and truth being tied together, I mean. They make each other possible, you know?