I don't think pandemics make us afraid of death, I think they make us afraid of oblivion. They force us to grapple with the futility of effort. Also they make us barf which isn't fun either... Wash your hands, cover your coughs, and find a way to hold in balance the futility of effort with the necessity to struggle.
John GreenDo you have a Wish?' he asked, referring to this organization, The Genie Foundation, which is in the business of granting sick kids one wish. 'No' I said. 'I used my Wish pre-Miracle.' 'What'd you do?' I sighed loudly. 'I was thirteen,' I said. 'Not Disney,' he said. I said nothing. 'You did not go to Disney World.' I said nothing. 'HAZEL GRACE!' he shouted. 'You did not use your one dying Wish to go to Disney World with your parents.' 'Also Epcot Center,' I mumbled. 'Oh, my God,' Augustus said. 'I can't believe I had a crush on a girl with such cliché wishes.
John GreenI found his last words without too much searching. Captured by the Bolivian army, Guevara said, 'Shoot, coward. You are only going to kill a man.
John GreenHe liked the idea of coffee quite a lot—a warm drink that gave you energy and had been for centuries associated with sophisticates and intellectuals. But coffee itself tasted to him like caffeinated stomach bile.
John GreenI knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him - that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.
John GreenAt the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.
John GreenIt was psychological trick called empathic listening. You say what the person is feeling so they feel understood.
John GreenIn English, we don't have a word for people who aren't virgins. What the non-virgin lexical gap really made me think was that our obsession with sexual purity is such that once you are no longer this THING, you are indescribable.
John GreenDad had a sign of his own. MY BEAUTIFUL FAMILY, it read, and then underneath that (AND GUS).
John GreenIn retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.
John GreenIssac:"I dislike living in a world without Augustus Waters." Computer: "I don't understand-" Issac: "Me neither. Pause
John GreenI want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.
John GreenThe tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself,' he said. 'And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us.
John GreenYou like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.
John GreenThere's some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.
John GreenI always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring. I doubted I could explain it to someone like Margo but drawing circles through life struck me as a kind of reasonable insanity.
John GreenI have spent my life falling. Not the kind that Tiny's talking about. He's talking about love. I'm talking about life. In my kind of falling, there's no landing. There's only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you're falling, it's the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.
John GreenI stood under the awning for a moment, but finally I decided that being in a bad mood with your friends beats being in a bad mood without them.
John GreenThe sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.
John GreenLike, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have no idea whether we’re actually motivated by altruism or a desire to hook up or a search for answers or what. I always get annoyed when in books or movies characters want clear things for clear reasons, because my experience of humanness is that I always want messy things for messy reasons.
John GreenTonight, 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.
John GreenIt's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do.
John GreenI tried--I swear I tried. But you didn't want to hear what I was saying, and I used that as an excuse to let it go on.
John GreenHarry Potter isn’t real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I don’t know who you are or what your name is or where you’re from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter’s real and you’re not.
John GreenDude, you're such a geek. And that's coming from an overweight Star Trek fan who scored a 5 on the AP Calculus test. So you know your condition is grave
John GreenBecause everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.
John GreenShe said Robert Joyner had killed himself with a gun. And then I asked why, and then she told me that he was getting a divorce and was sad about it.' 'Lots of people get divorces and don't kill themselves,' I said. 'I know,' she said, excitement in her voice. 'That's what I told her.
John GreenYou've got a lifetime to mull over the Buddhist understanding of interconnectedness." He spoke every sentence as if he'd written it down, memorized it, and was now reciting it. "But while you were looking out the window, you missed the chance to explore the equally interesting Buddhist belief in being present for every facet of your daily life, of being truly present. Be present in this class. And then, when it's over, be present out there," he said, nodding toward the lake and beyond.' ~Dr. Hyde, pg 50
John GreenEverything 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.
John GreenHeadline?" he asked. "'Swing Set Needs Home,'" I said. "'Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,'" he said. "'Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,'" I said.
John GreenYou could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, the little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that was not built for them by navigating a playground that was. . . Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Pete Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.
John GreenI'm sorry," she says. I wheel around. "You know, you're a total know-it-all. And it's incredibly rude sometimes; I mean, you're not perfect either, and you act like it's my fault but it's not my fault for being quiet or your fault for being a know-it-all. It's not your problem or my problem; it's their problem. They're the demented ones, not us, so don't take it out on me, because the only thing that holds things together for me is having someone else on the Not Demented Team.
John Green