He wasn't perfect or anything. He wasn;t your fairytale prince charming or whatever. He tried to be like that sometimes,but i liked him best when that stuff fell away.
John GreenI'm in love with you," he said quietly. "Augustus," I said. "I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.
John GreenHe loved the scratching of pencil against paper when he was focused: it meant something was happening.
John GreenWhat I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a very playful way of acknowledging that and acknowledging that and that always, whenever we play, whenever we live, we are living in both literal and metaphorical ways on the memory and bones of the dead.
John GreenOh, God, Alaska, I love you. I love you,' and the Colonel whispered, 'I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did,' and I said, 'No. Not past tense.
John GreenYou cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller, and that's the secret weapon of the bookstore - is that no algorithm will ever understand readers the way that other readers can understand readers.
John GreenWhat do you mean by meant? Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is it the only value passing time as comfortably as possible?
John GreenHer hair is ridiculous," I said. "I know. That was the only thing I said about her that was true. When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can't really fully and honestly take those back, you know? I mean, there are highlights. And there are streaks. And then there are skunk stripes.
John GreenWow,” I said. “Are you making this up?” “Hazel Grace, could I, with my meager intellectual capacities, make up a letter from Peter Van Houten featuring phrases like ‘our triumphantly digitized contemporaneity’?” “You could not,” I allowed. “Can I, can I have the email address?” “Of course,” Augustus said, like it was not the best gift ever.
John Green...it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.
John GreenI'm not from Indianapolis, but I like living in Indianapolis. If I were to explain it, I'd tell someone to imagine a city that perfectly captures the best and the worst of America. Imagine the truly American city, because that's what it is.
John GreenAt some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.
John GreenThe real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn't actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn't get smallpox.
John GreenHe liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.
John GreenBy saying you don’t care if the world falls apart, in some small way you’re saying you want it to stay together, on your own terms.
John GreenHi, I’m at the Speedway at Eighty-sixth and Ditch, and I need an ambulance. The great love of my life has a malfunctioning G-tube.
John GreenThomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over there'. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.
John GreenNothing's wrong. Everything's right. Things couldn't be righter. Things could be less tired. They could be less busy. They could be less caffeinated. But they couldn't be righter.
John GreenHere's my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I've ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.
John GreenYou know how we make a Scotch and water in this home?" "No, sir," Gus said. "We pour Scotch into a glass and then call to mind thoughts of water, and then we mix the actual Scotch with the abstracted idea of water.
John GreenShame about how we’re gonna die here, though. I mean, seriously. An Arab and a half-Jew enter a store in Tennessee. It’s the beginning of a joke, and the punch line is “sodomy’’.
John GreenYou can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can't say that Alabamans as a people are duly afraid of deep fryers.
John GreenI was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.
John GreenI don't think we should see the world of books as fundamentally separate from the world of the Internet. Yes, the Internet contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, but it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books.
John GreenI bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be all like, 'I'm busy, I got a job, I got stuff to do.' WHATEVER! READ! I mean, you're watching CSI: Miami. Why would you be watching CSI: Miami, when you could be READING CSI: Miami, the novelization?
John GreenThat's why people grow weary of listening to Dumpees obsess over their troubles: getting dumped is predictable, repetitive, and boring. They want to stay friends; they feel smothered; it's always them and it's never you; and afterward, you're devastated and their relieved; it's over for them and just starting for you.
John GreenRadar threw his books into his locker and shut it. Then the din of conversation around us quieted just a bit as he turned his eyes toward the heavens and shouted, "IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD'S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.
John GreenThe Colonel led all the cheers. Cornbread!" he screamed. CHICKEN!" the crowd responded. Rice!" PEAS!" And then, all together: "WE GOT HIGHER SATs." Hip Hip Hip Hooray!" the Colonel cried. YOU'LL BE WORKIN' FOR US SOMEDAY!
John GreenFinally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business.
John GreenAccording to Maslow, I was stuck on the second level of the pyramid, unable to feel secure in my health and therefore unable to reach for love and respect and art and whatever else, which is, utter horseshit: The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness. Maslow's pyramid seemed to imply I was less human than other people, and most people seemed to agree with him.
John GreenI couldn’t help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them—it was a kind of sad I didn’t mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.
John GreenYou can’t divorce Margo the person from Margo the body. You can’t see one without seeing the other. You looked at Margo’s eyes and you saw both their blueness and their Margo-ness. In the end, you could not say that Margo Roth Spiegelman was fat, or that she was skinny, any more than you can say that the Eiffel Tower is or is not lonely. Margo’s beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection – uncracked and uncrackable.
John Green