Quotes by John Green

He responded a few minutes later. Okay. I wrote back. Okay. He responded: Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!

Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slow, and then all at once.

It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.

Random questions are the least random of all questions.

He loved the scratching of pencil against paper when he was focused: it meant something was happening.

Why is it upset? Shouldn't it be downset?

Standing in line is a form of oppression.

You like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can survive in a way that once-requited love cannot.

Missing her kept him awake more than the coffee.

This is why we call people exes, I guess because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. It's too easy to see an X as a cross-out. It's not, because there's no way to cross out something like that. The X is a diagram of two paths.

I'm not up for laughing, but their laughter makes the room feel safer, so we begin to explore.

But monotony doesn't make for painlessness.

Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.

You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world. But you do have some say in who hurts you.

It is so hard to leave until you leave and then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

I fell in love the way you fall asleep; slowly, and then all at once.

Books--they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

This is what I love about novels -- both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.

I didn't know if I should hug him, and he didn't seem to know if he should hug me, so we just sort of stood there not touching, which to be honest is my preferred form of greeting.

I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed.

People are such idiots. As if there's something wrong with being in love.

You're not boring. You've got to stop saying that or people will start believing you.

But there was so much todo: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I'll have more time for reading when I'm old and boring.

I wasn't possessed by a demon. I was the demon.

My parents always liked it when I cursed in front of them. I could see the pleasure of it in their faces. It signified that I trusted them, that I was myself in front of them.

It sounded like a dragon breathing in time with me, like I had this pet dragon who was cuddled up next to me and cared enough about me to time his breaths to mine.

Wounded. Like Caroline Mathers had been a bomb and when she blew up everyone around her was left with embedded shrapnel.

We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?

The beautiful couple is beautiful.

We only have so long to play in the dirt and ask questions of rivers.

Something about looking up always makes me feel like I'm falling.

You deserve a life.

The problem with happy endings, I said, is that they're either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.

That tastes like hope feels.

I wasn't disappointed. My expectations had been met.

If it doesn't happen to you, it doesn't happen at all.

The Degree to which I am blessed staggers me... the degree to which I take that for granted shames me. -Streetwalking with Jesus.

The only sentence that begins with 'I' that's true of me is I'm full of shit.

We all matter -- maybe less then a lot but always more than none.

He's become the one the songs are about, and while part of me knows he's probably worth that, another part is yelling at me to slow the fuck down.

You can imagine another well-- but never quite perfectly, you know?

It's more impressive from a distance, I mean. You can't see the wear on things, you know? You can't see the rust or the weeds or the paint cracking. You see the place as someone once imagined it.

In our hyper-secular world, worship is still inevitable. But it is vital to remember that our gods don't choose us, we choose them.

Teenagers think they are invincible.

I'm not asexual. I'm arelationshipal.

The light filtered throught the leaves and pine needles above as if through lace, the ground spotted in shadow.

I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, God we must look so lame, but it doesn't matter much when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.

We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus.

It's not a value judgment. I'm not saying you're good or generous or kind or whatever. I'm just saying you're memorable.

I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me.

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?

Everyone wanted me to feed them that story--darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.

And people are moody, dude. You gotta get used to living with people.

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.

The first few days, I kept checking my phone, waiting for him to reply, but slowly I understood that we were going to be part of each other's past. I still missed him, though. I missed my dad, too. And Harold. I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.

Right, except I'm not going to lie to my mom, because what kind of bastard lies to his own mother?

When it works, anticipation is far more fulfilling than surprise, because we are reminded that a sunrise is precisely as magnificent as it is inevitable.

Everyone wants to leave an extraordinary life.

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose.

I'm not interested in writing for adults. I like them as people! I don't like the way they publish books in that world. Nothing ever gets a chance.

The true ninja doesn't make a splash at all.

So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be seen. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved.

Maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one .

On time for us was thirty minutes before actually started, because the half hour before the first bell was the highlight of our social calendars: standing outside the side door that led into the band room and just talking.

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.

Isn'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.

It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

I'm starting to realize that people 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.

If you act out of a paranoid fear of something happening, you will always make that thing happen.

It's like people believe all you need to do is like the same bands in order to be soulmates. Or book. Oh my god...you like The Outsiders too...it's like we're the same person! No, we're not. It's like we have the same English teacher. There's a difference.

My regret was immediate and permanent and useless.

You live for pretentious metaphors.

I give people credit for buying into consumerism.

There are books which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

How can you just be so wrong about something?

They belong to their readers now, which is a great thing -- because the books are more powerful in the hands of my readers than they could ever be in my hands.

Destiny is not something that happens all at once-it's something that happens only in retrospect.

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.

The worst thing that could happen had finally happened. And there was a kind of relief in it, maybe.

She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.

It sucked having a dead person in your family and I knew what he meant about seeking solace in the old light...because you can't let the light catch up with the present. Otherwise you'd forget.

You can't know what an experience will mean to future-you until you are future-you. You need millions of seconds of perspective, which ultimately, only time can buy.

It is not my fault that my parents own the world's largest collection of black Santas.

Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

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.

They were angry, I thought. Horrified. These teenagers, with their hormones, making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.

Like they just wanted to enjoy The Gus Waters Show while it was still in town.

Writing is something you do alone. It's a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.

When you're as charming and physically attractive as myself, it's easy enough to win over people you meet. But getting strangers to love you...now, that's the trick.

I hated talking, and 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.

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.

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.

The pleasure isn't in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it.

I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.

Both my parents are therapists, which means that I am really goddamned well adjusted.

There is no try. There is only do.

Honestly, I don't even like my type of girl that much, let alone other types. Not that I'm asexual or something -- I just find Romance Drama unbearable.

I like us. I like that we've got our own way of doing things.