John Green Quotes - Page 4

It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it. Because you can’t be sure, you know?
John Green
All right. The snow may be falling in the winter of my discontent, but at least I've got sarcastic company.
John Green
We are literally in the heart of Jesus," he said."I thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus.""Someone should tell Jesus," I said. "I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart.
John Green
Where do you come up with these zingers, Clint? Do you own some kind of joke factory in Indonesia where you've got eight-year-olds working ninety hours a week to deliver you that kind of top-quality witticism? There are boy bands with more original material.
John Green
He just waited until I stopped talking and said, 'Jesus, kid, you're almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what's your theory?
John Green
When you date someone, you have the markers along the way, right: You kiss, you have The Talk, you say the Three Little Words, you sit on a swing set and break up. You can plot the points on a graph. And you check up with each other along the way: Can I do this? If I say this, will you say it back?"But with friendship, there's nothing like that. Being in a relationship, that's something you choose. Being friends, that's just something you are.
John Green
... going out late at night and laying in the dewy field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight.
John Green
Later, I walked towards the dorm circle beside Alaska. The cicadas hummed their one-note song, just as they had at home in Florida. She turned to me as we made our way through the darkness and said,"When you’re walking at night, do you ever get creeped out and even though it’s silly and embarrassing you just want to run home?”It seemed too secret and personal to admit to a virtual stranger but I told her, “Yeah, totally.”For a moment, she was quiet. Then she grabbed my hand, whispered,“Run run run run run,” and took off, pulling me behind her.
John Green
One of the Great Rules of Economics According to John GreenIf you are rich, you have to be an idiot not to stay rich. And if you are poor, you have to be really smart to get rich.
John Green
I realized that all my life, my values were based upon typical middle-class American values: hard work, doing good, living well, owning things, following the rules & being the best I can be... but God clearly says, "those are not MY values. I value justice, mercy & humility.
John Green
All of us, poor & rich alike, have been conditioned by our upbringings. Impoverished men & women may become lulled into a state of "learned helplessness" without hope to change their lives. Likewise, the wealthy can walk in a state of "learned blindness" ignoring the desperation of the local & global poor.
John Green
Be present in this class. And then, when it's over, be present out there.
John Green
I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn't sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it.
John Green
I 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 Green
Pudge/Colonel: "I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I guess. And I had this secret. You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide. She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something. She walked away, and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking. So I let her go too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to." Takumi
John Green
The longer I do my job ... the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.
John Green
...the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world.
John Green
What are you assholes looking at?" "Nothing," said Radar. "We're certainly not looking at your eyebrows.
John Green
I do my precalc homework, and then when I'm done I actually sit with the textbook for like three hours and try to understand what I just did. That's the kind of weekend it is--the kind where you have so much time you go past the answers and start looking into the ideas.
John Green
It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she'd left for me.
John Green
It's funny how they thought we were dating," Colin said, glancing over at her."How's that funny?" she asked, holding his gaze."Um," he said. Distracted from the road, Colin watched as she gave him the slightest version of her inimitable smile.
John Green
When you're on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that. Nobody who's doing it ever talks about anything else. I have no interest in dating.
John Green
We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.
John Green
I know it’s impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you’re older, you start to see them—the bad kids and the good kids and all kids—as people. They’re just people, who deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self- actualized.
John Green
I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.
John Green
I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were...miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around.
John Green
Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.
John Green
She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin's so pale she looks like she's just broken dawn.
John Green
Ultimately what I like about reading together is that we all make it happen together. Of course even amid shared experience we’re still alone… each reading of each book is unique. But what a comfort it is to share readings and experiences. How lucky we are when we get to be alone together.
John Green
I'm a grenade, I just want to stay away from people and read books, and think...
John Green
Jeb is going to grow up to be the kind of man who spends his Saturdays teaching his little boy to ride a bike. (...) Charlie, on the other hand, will be off playing golf while his kid kills people on his Xbox. Charlie will be dashing and debonair, and he'll buy his kid all kinds of crap, but he'll never actually be there.
John Green
Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.
John Green
We are not as frail as the strings would make us believe.
John Green
All salvation is temporary, . . . I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing.
John Green
Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?" "Sometimes people don't always understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said.Isaac shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?"I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer.But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.
John Green
...everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.
John Green
True love will triumph in the end—which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have.
John Green
I've never known before what it feels like to want someone - not to want to hook up with them or whatever, but to want them, to want them. And now I do. So maybe I do believe in epiphanies.
John Green
You used," he said, and then took a sharp breath, "to call me Augustus.
John Green
Ergo: girls should always make the first move, because (a) they are, on the whole, less likely to be rejected than guys, (b) that way, girls will never get kissed unless they want to be kissed.
John Green
Okay, so anagrams. That’s one. Got any other charming talents?” she asked, and now he felt confident.Finally, Colin turned to her, gathering in his gut the slim measure of courage available to him, and said, “Well, I’m a fair kisser.
John Green
and then I couldn't wait anymore, and my hand was on the back of her head, and then her lips on mine, the cold air gone and replaced with the warmth of her mouth, soft and sweet and hash-brown-tastic
John Green
Your professional physicist opinion?" I ask.She smiles. "I believe the cat to be alive. And what says my esteemed colleague?""Alive," I say.
John Green
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.
John Green
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 toward 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.
John Green
Life tries to crush her, but only succeeded in making a diamond.
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 a life 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 a life or a death that means anything.
John Green
Were she better, or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves.
John Green
It occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because the is always the thought that everything might be done better and again
John Green
Some tourist think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a ciry of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.
John Green
We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness.
John Green
We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. Augustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer. He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim - as you will be - of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible.
John Green
...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,
John Green
She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me.
John Green
We have to forgive to survive in this labyrinth [of suffering]
John Green
We need never to be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken.
John Green
A sequel that will exist just for us
John Green
That's what I believe. I believe that universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?
John Green
And on some level it walways felt like kids paying at being grown
John Green
You should see it,” he said. “V for Vendetta, I mean.”“Okay,” I said. “I’ll look it up.”“No. With me. At my house,” he said. “Now.
John Green