John Green Quotes - Page 7

I thought: We are not close enough. I thought: He will not hear it. I thought: He will hear it and be out so fast that we will have no chance. I thought: Twenty seconds. I was breathing hard ans fast.
John Green
We left. We did not say: Don't drive, You're drunk. We did not say: We aren't letting you in that car when you are upset. We did not say: We insist on going with you. We did not say: This can wait until tomorrow. Anything-everything-can wait.
John Green
My thoughts are stars i cannot fathom into constellations
John Green
My thoughts are stars I can't fanthom into constellations.
John Green
Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it. And I had thought the thought.
John Green
but there was nothing I could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intra cranial firecrackers
John Green
Don't worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway
John Green
Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will… but then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all. Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside someone else… But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills the fascists
John Green
Maybe Harry Potter is real and you're not.
John Green
I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.
John Green
I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?
John Green
That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.[p214]
John Green
Why do writers use symbolism?” Okay, so let’s say you have a headache and you wanna tell someone about it and you say, “I have a headache!” and other people are like, “Yeah, whatever. Everybody gets headaches.” But your headache is not a regular headache, it’s a serious headache, so you say, “My brain is on fire!” to try to help these people understand that this is a headache that needs attention! That’s a metaphor, right? And you use it so that you can be understood. Now let’s say you want to take those same imagistic principles but apply them to a much more complex idea than having a headache, like, for instance, the yearning that one feels for one’s dreams. And you can see the dream but you can’t cross the bay to get to the green light that embodies your dream. And you want to talk about how socio-economic class in America is a barrier – a bay-like barrier, some would say – that stands between you and the green light and makes that gap unbridgeable. Now, you can just talk about that stuff directly, but when you talk about it symbolically, it becomes more powerful, because instead of being abstract it becomes kind of observable…. So I think that’s why.
John Green
Sometimes I dream that I'm writing a memoir. A memoir would just be the thing to keep me in the hearts and memories of my adoring public.
John Green
You'll... you'll... live your best life today.
John Green
I realize that they giggle and I actually laugh, that they show their cleavage and I have none to show, but just so you know, I am also a girl. I'm one of the three wise MEN. And it's gay to think that James Bond is hot.
John Green
He really was beautiful. I know boys aren’t supposed to be, but he was.
John Green
Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.
John Green
Most of my friends were in band, and most of my free time during school was spent within twenty feet of the band room
John Green
Kafir, you have a very complicated problem with a very simple solution.
John Green
you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends nose.
John Green
Part of not being a self-centered asshole, Colin reasoned, is doing things with your friends even when you don't want to.
John Green
This was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories. I only listened - the stories on my mind weren't that funny.
John Green
...being in a bad mood with your friends beats being in a bad mood without them.
John Green
But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all. Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo's anger at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in.
John Green
I lay down and started to feel a little depressed about prom. I refused to feel any kind of sadness over the fact that I wasn't going to prom, but I had - stupidly, embarrassingly - thought of finding Margo, and getting her to come home with me just in time for prom, like late on Saturday night, and we'd walk into the Hilton ballroom wearing jeans and ratty T-shirts, and we'd be just in time for the last dance, and we'd dance while everyone pointed at us and marveled at the return of Margo, and then we'd fox-trot the hell out of there and go get ice cream at Friendly's. So yes, like Ben, I harbored ridiculous prom fantasies. But at least I didn't say mine out loud.
John Green
People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember.
John Green
Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will. But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all
John Green
Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning she haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.
John Green
The silence broke:"Sometimes I liked it", I said "Sometimes I liked it that she was dead.""You mean it felt good?""No. I don't know. It felt ... pure.
John Green
No reason to be angry. Anger just distracts from the all-encompassing sadness.
John Green
What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.
John Green
I think how much depends upon a best friend. When you wake up in the morning you swing your legs out of bed and you put your feet on the ground and you stand up. You don't scoot to the edge of the bed and look down to make sure the floor is there. The floor is always there. Until it's not.
John Green
Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says.The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.
John Green
(...) and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water's death was Augustus Water.
John Green
I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What.
John Green
Grief does not change you. It reveals you.
John Green
I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater. But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried.
John Green
There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.
John Green
You can love someone so much… But you can never love someone as much as you miss them.
John Green
You don't get to chose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.
John Green
You get all these friends when just when you don't need friends anymore.
John Green
im in love with you and im not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.
John Green
Issac:"I dislike living in a world without Augustus Waters."Computer: "I don't understand-"Issac: "Me neither. Pause
John Green
He was gone and did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth.
John Green
The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.
John Green
...and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth.
John Green
You are helpful, and you are loved, and you are forgiven, and you are not alone.
John Green
He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.
John Green
... that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we have to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.
John Green
So I let her go, too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.Takumi
John Green
. . . we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.
John Green
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 Green
Tiny is saying, "If you can't trust your gut then what can you trust?" And I say, "You can trust that caring, as a rule, ends poorly," which is true. Caring doesn't sometimes lead to misery. It always does.
John Green
She raised one leg and gave me all her weight as I dipped her. She either trusted me or wanted to fall.
John Green
Inside the building, the sun lights up segments of the rotting wooden floor through the many holes in the roof. As I look for her, I register things: the soggy floorboards. The smell of almonds, like her. An old claw-footed bathtub in a corner. So many holes everywhere that this place is simultaneously inside and outside.
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. t
John Green
I am trying to find ways to live honestly and hopefully in the world without ignoring or denying the universe´s cold and painful indifference to us.
John Green
Such was life that morning: nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous." (pg. 18)
John Green
I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. Those seem to be the two choices. Everything else is just killing time.
John Green