He told me this while ripping through his duffel bag, throwing clothes into drawers with reckless abandon. Chip did not believe in having a sock drawer or a T-shirt drawer. He believed that all drawers were created equal and filled each with whatever fit. My mother would have died.
John GreenThe pure and simple truth Is rarely pure and never simple. What's a boy to do When lies and truth are both sinful?
John GreenPhysical intimacy isnโt and can never be an effective substitute for emotional intimacy.
John GreenI laughed and pointed out that "Hash Browns Mean Nothing Without You" was a pretty good name for a band. "Or a song," the Duke said, and then she started singing all glam rock, a glove up to her face holding an imaginary mic as she rocked out an a cappella power ballad. "Oh, I deep fried for you / But now I weep 'n' cry for you / Oh, babe, this meal was made for two / And these hash browns mean nothing, oh these hash browns mean nothing, yeah these HASH BROWNS MEAN NOTHIN' without you.
John GreenYou know, like when you look in the mirror and the thing you see is not the thing as it really is.
John GreenThe Degree to which I am blessed staggers me... the degree to which I take that for granted shames me. -Streetwalking with Jesus
John GreenI believe in hope, in what is something called โradical hope.โ I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And thatโs why I write fiction, probaby. Itโs my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r
John GreenI do not say goodbye. I believe that's one of the bullshitiest words ever invented. It's not like you're given the choice to say bad-bye, or awful-bye, or couldn't-care-less-about-you-bye. Everytime you leave, it's supposed to be a good one.
John GreenThe miracle and hope of human consciousness is that we can still conceive of boundlessness.
John GreenI didn't know whether to trust Alaska, and I'd certainly had enough of her unpredictability - cold one day, sweet the next; irresistibly flirty one moment, resistibly obnoxious the next. I preferred the Colonel: At least when he was cranky, he had a reason.
John GreenHow can you read and talk at the same time?โ I asked. โWell, I usually canโt, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.
John GreenAs far as all of our identities are dependent on how other people imagine us we are all making ourselves and each other up all the time
John GreenAugustus Waters," I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank House, and then thinking that Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Anne Frank House, and that she would probably like nothing more than for her home to have become a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love.
John GreenWhat I eventually realized is that the real business of books is not done by awards committees or people who turn trees into paper or editors or agents or even writers. We're all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers.
John GreenIsn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.
John GreenSomething about telling that story made my gut grow back together." What?" Oh, nothing. Just thinking out loud." That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of." The people who've been in your secret hiding places." The people you bite your thumb in front of." Hi." Hi." ..." ..." Wow. My first Lindsey." My second Colin." That was fun. Let's try it again." Sold." ..." ..." ...".
John GreenDo you know why I left America, Lidewij? So that I would never again have to encounter Americans." "But you are an American." "Incurably so, it seems.
John GreenEven if itโs a dumb story, telling it changes people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinetisimal change ripples outward โever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter โmaybe less than a lot, but always more than none.
John GreenI really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.
John GreenI hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn't hate people who watched or played them.
John GreenIf I had cared about her as I should have, as I thought I did, how could I have let her go?
John GreenI was thinking about this girl you love so much," she said, "And this place I love so much. And how that happens. How you can just fall into it.
John GreenRight, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning,' and Isben looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he died.
John GreenShe didnโt understand why it was happening,โ he said. โI had to tell her she would die. Her social worker said I had to tell her. I had to tell her she would die, so I told her she was going to heaven. She asked if I would be there, and I said that I would not, not yet. But eventually, she said, and I promised that yes, of course, very soon. And I told her that in the meantime we had great family up there that would take care of her. And she asked me when I would be there, and I told her soon. Twenty-two years ago.
John GreenThe sky is like a monochromatic contemporay painting, drawing me in its illusion of depth, pulling me up.
John GreenShe raised one leg and gave me all her weight as a I dipped her. She either trusted me or wanted to fall.
John GreenI'm on a roller coaster that only goes up," he said. "And it is my privilege and my responsibility to ride all the way up with you," I said.
John GreenYou'll live forever in our hearts, big man. That particularly galled me, because it implied the immortality of those left behind: You will live forever in my memory, because I will live forever! I AM YOUR GOD NOW, DEAD BOY! I OWN YOU!
John Green