Quotes by John Green
(Page 5 of 7)

The missing piece in his stomach hurt so much-and eventually he stopped thinking about the Theorem and wondered only how something that isn't there can hurt you.

You can't know, sweetie, because you've never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.

But there's so much to do: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on.

I think it's crazy, crazy that book tours lose so much money. They shouldn't. Book tours should be part of what keeps independent bookstores vibrant and profitable.

Is that what relationships become? A reduced version of the hurt, nothing else let in. It was more than that. I know it was more than that.

Why would you try to kill this guy, Kevin? He's a genius. Nuts to your truce.

That's what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team up and be this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered.

You're amazing, and I so want to be your boyfriend, because of what you just said, and also because that shirt makes me want to take you home and do unspeakable things while we watch live-action Sailor Moon videos.

I think all true stories are hopeful stories. I don't think there's any room for nihilism.

I pulled the oxygen tubes from my nostrils and raised the tube up over my head, handing it to Dad. I wanted it to be just me and just him.

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.

A taste so profound and complex that it can't even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, tastes like love without the fear of love's dissolution.

The oldest pictures were faded and yellowing, and Colin thought about how even in pictures of their youth, old people look old.

Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?

She raised one leg and gave me all her weight as I dipped her. She either trusted me or wanted to fall.

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

We have this weird thing in the world where you don't get insulted for what you do, you get insulted for who you are.

Empires rose and fell, and still the speaker droned on in his cicada-like monotony.

The town was paper, but the memories were not.

Your mom gives a shit, you know? Most adults are just hollowed out.

The nature of impending fatherhood is that you are doing something that you're unqualified to do, and then you become qualified while doing it.

His diaphragm fluttered. And of course it couldn't have been lust or love and it didn't feel like like, so it must have been what the kids at school called like-like.

Here's to celebrating light where we find it.
And making light where we don't.

You can never love someone as much as you miss them.

And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.

You shall love your neighbour
With your crooked heart,
It says so much about love and brokenness -- it's perfect.

A small olive-skinned creature who had hit puberty but never hit it very hard, Ben had been my best friend since fifth grade, when we both finally owned up to the fact that neither of us was likely to attract anyone else as a best friend.

Well, but you can eat Grandma's cookies. They're not bad for you. They were made by Grandma. Grandma wouldn't hurt you.

The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed.

I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.

We're going to get gored to death by a feral fugging hog and your best strategy is to pretend it's a grizzly bear?

There's no way of knowing that your last good day is Your Last Good Day. At the time, it is just another good day.

It makes me sad because it only exists in words.

And even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.

I'm just sucking food, water, money from the world, and all I'm giving back is, 'Hey, I'm really good at not'doing. Look at all the bad things I'm not doing.

I'm into math the way my nine-year-old self was into skateboarding. I talk about it a lot, and I think about it a lot, but I can't actually, like, do it.

The thing is that it could never again feel natural to talk to her.

Oh shit did you just dis the feminine gender
I'll pummel your ass then stick you in a blender
You think I like Tori and Ani so I can't rhyme
But I got flow like Ghostbusters got slime
Objectify women and it's fuckin' on
You'll be dead and gone like ancient Babylon.

You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town.

I didn't know whether to trust Alaska, and I'd certainly had enough of her unpredictability -- cold one day, sweet the next; irresistibly flirty one moment, resistibly obnoxious the next. I preferred the Colonel: At least when he was cranky, he had a reason.

We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness.

She loves mysteries that she became one.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

I know love is real because I feel it.

You had been a paper boy to me all these years -- two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real.

Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.

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.

I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.

I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.

What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.

That's why I love road trips, dude. It's like doing something without actually doing anything.

He really was beautiful. I know boys aren't supposed to be, but he was.

That poem is so damned long. You'd think old Walt could have taken a line or two to tell us how to unscrew the door from its jamb.

All I have to do is stay in between the lines and make sure that no one is too close to me and I am not too close to anyone and keep leaving. Maybe it felt like this for her, too, but I could never feel like this alone.

And as paralyzing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final leaving felt perfect. Pure. The most distilled possible form of liberation.

You can't just make me different, and then leave. Because I was fine before, Alaska. I was just fine with me and last words and school friends, and you can't just make me different and then die.

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.

If I'm too old to be Emo, how do you account for the very Emo and very old Edgar Allan Poe? Checkmate!

In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business--and I wanted to try to reflect that.

No headboards were broken.

You never think much about weather when it's good, but once it gets cold enough to see your breath you can't ignore it. The weather decides when you think about it, not the other way around.

I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointments in the Department of Having a Voice that Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin.

Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy ... well.

I'm telling you, Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interrupt you at his own funeral.

Funerals...are for the living.

I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

Use your words.

We are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.

Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? 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?

I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.

A paper town for a paper girl.

Imagine others complexly.

What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.

The darkest nights produce the brightest stars.

Maybe the sure knowledge that she is alive makes all of that possible again--even if I never see proof of it. I can almost imagine a happiness without her, the ability to let her go, to feel our roots are connected even if I never see that leaf of grass again.

The clock was always punishing, but feeling like I was closer to unraveling the knots made time seem to stop entirely.

Someone who--because no one thought she was a person--had no one to really talk to.

Maybe she had sat here in the cacophonous darkness and felt some kind of desperation take her over, and maybe she found it impossible to unthink the thought of death. I could imagine that, of course.

I remembered that morning, and I felt something twist at my gut in the remembering of it.

Maybe she deserved to be forgotten. But at any rate, I couldn't forget her.

She never really got what it's all about. The adventure. She seemed pretty depressed, actually.

This raw pleasure was worth all the worry that preceded it.

And finally it was too much. I could not talk myself down from the feeling, and the feeling became unbearable.

Yeah, well, she's known me since I was a baby. And she cares about us. But she also gets paid to care about us, you know? And if she didn't... I mean, she'd have to find a different job.

My children are grown-ups., so you and Noah are my only little boys I have left.

All along, I kept thinking, I will never do this again, I will never be here again.

Let's continue this awkward silence in person.

You seemed locked inside of your mind, and I can't know what's going on in there, and it scared me.

I don't want to be part of an us that makes a them of the world's most vulnerable people.

You and I are just kids. We've got the best and the worst of it in front of us.

We think of infinity as a really big number, but it's not. It's endlessness. Endlessness is a really strange idea in a universe that is defined by its endings.

And even though he felt pitiful and ridiculous, he didn't want it to end, because he knew the absence of her would hurt more than any breakup ever could.

It was a lame string, for sure, but it was the one I had left and every paper girl needs at least one string, right?

You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.

Dumpers may not always be the heartbreakers, and the Dumpees may not always be the heartbroken. But everyone has a tendency.

This is it. I can't even not smoke anymore.

Augustus Waters was sitting on the front step as we pulled into the driveway. He was holding a bouquet of bright orange tulips just beginning to bloom.

The thought of you being removed from the rotation is not funny to me.

As I recall, you promised to CALL when you finished the book, not text.