John Green Quotes - Page 2

You gave me forever within the numbered days.
John Green
It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
John Green
Big, ugly homes for big, ugly people,' I told Margo as we pulled into Casavilla.'No shit. If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms, do me a favor and shoot me.
John Green
If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be mt flowers.
John Green
That doesn't sound like my Margo", she said, and I thought of my Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different funhouse mirrors.
John Green
Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? I mean, I’ve always felt like the Katherines dump me right when they start to see what I look like from the inside—well, except K-19. But I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself—if they could live in my memories—would anyone, anyone, love me?
John Green
I feel like how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It'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 Green
I don't think your missing pieces ever go inside you again once they go missing.
John Green
The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won’t be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don’t live alife in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either alife or a death that means anything.
John Green
You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you’re trying to listen to.
John Green
Because personally I think mattering is a piss-poor idea. I just want to fly under the radar, because when you start to make yourself into a big deal, that’s when you get shot down. The bigger a deal you are, the worse your life is.
John Green
I’m really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why, or what.
John Green
Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears.
John Green
I don't really understand the point of crying. Also, I feel that crying is almost - like, aside from deaths of relatives or whatever - totally avoidable if you follow two very simple rules: 1. Don't care too much. 2. Shut up. Everything unfortunate that has ever happened to me has stemmed from failure to follow one of the rules.
John Green
People are supposed to care. It's good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they're gone.
John Green
You put the thing that does the killing between your teeth, but you never give it the power to kill you
John Green
It´s a metaphor: you see, you put the killing thing right between your teeth,you just don't give it the power to do it's killing.
John Green
I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?
John Green
Oh, Wikipedia, with your tension between those who would share knowledge and those who would destroy it.
John Green
... if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.
John Green
I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don't fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don't want to see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big...mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.
John Green
I missed the future.
John Green
Maybe life is not about accomplishing some bullshit markers.
John Green
You and I are just kids. We've got the best and the worst of it in front of us
John Green
I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness...I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still that think that, sometimes, maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter...I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take her genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else there entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed...energy is never created and never destroyed. We cannot be born and cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations... Thomas 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 Green
If the inevitably of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does.
John Green
The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank's name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. FOUR. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around.
John Green
There is always the risk: something is good and good and good, and then all at once it gets awkward. All at once, she sees you looking at her, and then she doesn't want to seem flirty, because she doesn't want you to think she likes you. It's such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away all the wall of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle--oh, look, we broke down this wall, I'm going to look at you like a girl and you're going to look like me like a boy and we're going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About There What About There. And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself that it's not the middle but will last forever.
John Green
That didn't happen, of course. Things never happenedlike I imagined them.
John Green
we need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken
John Green
The thing is that it could never again feel natural to talk to her
John Green
Because you simply cannot draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.
John Green
I felt the worry start to snatch at my breath when I finished talking.
John Green
And yet still I worried. I like being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.
John Green
In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business—and I wanted to try to reflect that.
John Green
Photographs are just light and time" - Aza Holmes
John Green
I am in love with you, and I am not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.
John Green
My heart is really pounding," I said. "That's how you know you're having fun.
John Green
No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.
John Green
The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never get struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.
John Green
Love is always a miracle, everywhere, every time.
John Green
But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?-Aza
John Green
If you dont' live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good.
John Green
The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed.
John Green
NOTHING HAS EVER LOOKED LIKE THAT EVER IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY,” he said. His enthusiasm was adorable. I couldn’t resist leaning over to kiss him on the cheek.“Just so you know, I’m right here,” Mom said. “Sitting next to you. Your mother. Who held your hand as you took your first infantile steps.”“It’s friendly,” I reminded her, turning to kiss her on the cheek.“Didn’t feel too friendly,” Gus mumbled just loud enough for me to hear. When surprised and excited and innocent Gus emerged from Grand Gesture Metaphorically Inclined Augustus, I literally could not resist.
John Green
Hey,' he said, touching my waist. 'Hey. It's okay.' I nodded and wiped my face with the back of my hand. 'He sucks.' I nodded again. 'I'll write you an epilogue,' Gus said. That made me cry harder. 'I will,' he said. 'I will. Better than any sh*t that drunk could write. His brain is Swiss cheese. He doesn't even remember writing the book. I can write ten times the story that guy can. There will be blood and guts and sacrifice. An Imperial Affliction meets The Prince of Dawn. You'll love it.' I kept nodding, faking a smile, and then he hugged me, his strong arms pulling me into his muscular chest, and I sogged up his polo shirt a little but then recovered enough to speak.
John Green
Everything's uglier up close.Not you.
John Green
If people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricaine
John Green
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.
John Green
Why is being a nerd so bad? saying " I noticed you're a nerd is like saying hey, I noticed you'd rather be intelligent that stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan
John Green
These are all direct quotes, except every time they use a curse word, I'm going to use the name of a famous American poet:'You Walt Whitman-ing, Edna St. Vincent Millay! Go Emily Dickinson your mom!''Thanks for the advice, you pathetic piece of E.E. Cummings, but I think I'm gonna pass.''You Robert Frost-ing Nikki Giovanni! Get a life, nerd. You're a virgin.''Hey bro, you need to go outside and get some fresh air into you. Or a girlfriend.'I need to get a girlfriend into me? I think that shows a fundamental lack of comprehension about how babies are made.
John Green
I’m not up for laughing, but their laughter makes the room feel safer, so we begin to explore.
John Green
I thought of the one thing about home that I missed, my dad's study with its built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves sagging with thick biographies and the black leather chair that kept me just uncomfortable enough to keep from feeling sleepy as I read.
John Green
This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library.
John Green
I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true… Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.
John Green
If my public existence does anything worthwhile, hopefully it at least demystifies the author a bit, because I know when I was younger I felt like authors were like wizards or something. Turns out they're total muggles.
John Green
JP shouted, "TELL THEM WHAT YOU JUST DID TO EACH OTHER!""Um," I said."We kissed," the Duke said."That's kinda gay," Keun said."I AM A GIRL.""Yeah, I know, but so is Tobin," Keun said.
John Green
Sorry," I said to the Duke."Eh, it's not your fault. It's Carla's fault. You were turning the wheel. Carla just wasn't listening. I knew I shouldn't have loved her. She's like all the others, Tobin; as soon as I confess my love, she abandons me."I laughed. "I never abandoned you," I said patting on her back."Yeah, well, (a.) I never confessed my love to you, and (b.) I'm not even female to you.
John Green
Why had Ovid lived in Ancient Rome in 20 BCE23 and not Chicago in 2006 CE? Would Ovid still have been Ovid if he had lived in America? No, he wouldn’t have been, because he would have been a Native American or possibly an American Indian or a First Person or an Indigenous Person, and they did not have Latin or any other kind of written language then. So did Ovid matter because he was Ovid or because he lived in Ancient Rome?
John Green
I didn't really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia.
John Green