John Green Quotes

COLUMBUS BROUGHT SMALLPOX TO THE NATIVES; WE SHALL RECALL THE OCCASION WITH A PICNIC!

Like, what if the people around you had been different?" "How can you separate those things, though? The people are the place is the people. And anyway, I didn't think there was anybody else to be friends with. I thought everyone was either scared, like you, or oblivious, like Lacey. And th -

And I put the latte down on a table, awash in the happy middle of my greatest adventure.

i wanted more time so we could fall in love.

Don't worry. Worry is useless.

I don't see a future where we're all taught by robots. The real life, physical experience of being in a classroom and having conversations with knowledgeable people is immeasurably valuable and irreplaceable.

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

I don't decide where I live. My wife decides. She's a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.

It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where girls' bodies ease from one place to another, from arc to the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to wait to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I'd noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance.

You have my word. And I'll see you. We're not done seeing each

The United States Congress, like a lot of rich people, lives in two houses.

Kaitlyn never wore open-toed shoes on account of how she hated her feet because she felt her second toes were too long, as if the second toe was a window into the soul or something.

There are a number of ways to establish someone's approximate survival expectations without actually asking.

I was so tired of her getting upset for no reason. The way she would get sulky and make references to the freaking oppressive nature of tragedy or whatever but then never said what was wrong, never have any goddamned reason to be sad. And I just think you ought to have a reason. My girlfriend dumped me, so I'm sad. I got caught smoking, so I'm pissed off. My head hurts, so I'm cranky. She never had a reason, Pudge. I was just so tired of putting up with her drama. And I just let her go. Christ.

We fatties have a bond, dude. It's like a secret society. We got all kinds of shit you don't know about. Handshakes, special fat people dances-we got these secret fugging lairs in the center of the earth and we go down there in the middle of the night when all the skinny kids are sleeping and eat cake and friend chicken and shit. Why d'you think Hollis is still sleeping, kafir? Because we were up all night in the secret lair injecting butter frosting into our veins ... A fatty trusts another fatty.

Then Augustus Waters reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes. He flipped it open and put a pack between his lips.
"Are you serious?" I asked. "You think that's cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing."
"Which whole thing?" he asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of his mouth.
"The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that, oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? SUCKS. Totally disappointing. Totally."
"A hamartia?" he asked, the cigarette still in his mouth. It tightened his jaw. He had a hell of a jawline, unfortunately.
"A fatal flaw," I explained, turning away from him.

Pudge," she said, faux-condescending, "the sound is an integral part of the artistic experience of this video game. Muting Decapitation would be like reading only every other word of Jane Eyre.

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire! Hell is in your future if you give in to desire!

When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

... if you don't say the honest thing, sometimes the honest thing never becomes true.

It is very sad to me that some people are so intent on leaving their mark on the world that they don't care if that mark is a scar.

(from the author Q&A)
Q. After you wrote the book, however much time has passed, do you think back and wish you could write more, or that you could somehow create more of their world?
A. I never wish I could go back and write more, no. I spent a long, long time trying to write the book that became The Fault in Our Stars and to be completely honest with you, I am entirely happy that the story is no longer my problem and is now your problem.

I thought it might be a fine time to say the Three Little Words. And I steeled myself to say them as I stared up at that starriest night, convinced myself that she felt it, too, that her hand so alive and vivid against my leg was more than playful, and fuck Lara and fuck Jake because I do, Alaska Young, I do love you and what else matters but that and my lips parted to speak and before I could even begin to breathe out the words, she said, It's not life or death, the labyrinth.

Gus flipped open the egg carton and handed Isaac an egg. Isaac tossed it, missing the car by a solid forty feet.
"A little to the left," Gus said.
"My throw was a little to the left or I need to aim a little to the left?"
"Aim left." Isaac swiveled his shoulders.
"Lefter," Gus said. Isaac swiveled again.
"Yes. Excellent. And throw hard."
Gus handed him another egg, and Isaac hurled it, the egg arcing over the car and smashing against the slow-sloping roof of the house. "Bull's-eye!" Gus said.
"Really?" Isaac asked excitedly.
"No, you threw it like twenty feet over the car. Just, throw hard, but keep it low. And a little right of where you were last time."
Isaac reached over and found an egg himself from the carton Gus cradled. He tossed it, hitting a tailing.
"Yes!" Gus said. "Yes! TAILLIGHT!

School and a year into remission. You had to be pretty sick for the Genies to hook you up with a Wish. "I got it in exchange for the leg," he explained. There was all this light on his face; he had to squint to look at me, which made his nose crinkle adorably. "Now, I'm not going to give you my Wish or anything. But I also have an interest in meeting Peter Van Houten, and it wouldn't make sense to meet him without the girl who introduced me to his book." "It definitely wouldn't," I said. "So I talked to the Genies, and they are in total agreement. They said Amsterdam is lovely in the beginning of May. They proposed

I'll fight it. I'll fight it for you. Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I'm okay. I'll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time.

He was too smart for the kinds of solace I could offer.

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]

I want to leave a mark.

But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars.

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?

Our infinity is bigger than other infinities.

Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal.

She will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person.

I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen.

But he didn't survive a war, not really," Augustus said. "He survived a genocide.

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

If you ever do decide to write anything else, even if you don't want to publish it, I'd love to read it. Frankly, I'd read your grocery lists.

Can I ask you about Caroline Mathers?"
"And you say there's no afterlife.

I'm so proud of you that it makes me proud of me. I hope you know that.

The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.

Like, you're never alone here. But also, you're never with people. It's possible this isn't a hospital-specific problem, come to think of it.

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's 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 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

I shall say you will die and none will remember you.)

There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined. I feel like this is an important idea, one of those ideas that your brain must wrap itself around slowly, the way pythons eat ...

Traffic's not too bad on Sheridan, and I'm cornering the car like it's the Indy 500, and we're listening to my favorite NMH song, "Holland, 1945," and then onto Lake Shore Drive, the waves of Lake Michigan crashing against the boulders by the Drive, the windows cracked to get the car to defrost, the dirty, bracing, cold air rushing in, and I love the way Chicago smells - Chicago is brackish lake water and soot and sweat and grease and I love it, and I love this song, and Tiny's saying I love this song, and he's got the visor down so he can muss up his hair a little more expertly.

The poor Sufi dressed in rags walked into a jewelry store owned by a rich merchant and asked him, "Do you know how you're going to die." And the Sufi said, "I do.""How?" asked the merchant.
And the Sufi lay down, crossed his arms, said, "Like this," and died, whereupon the merchant promptly gave up his store to live a life of poverty in pursuit of the kind of spiritual wealth the dead Sufi had acquired.

I've been smart longer.

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

And it occurred to Colin that the kiss didn't feel nearly as good as the sound of her asking him if he wanted to be her boyfriend.

God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.

I think ya'll should work for me this summer in Gutshot. I'm starting a project, and you'd be perfect for it.
Over the years, people had occasionally sought to employ Colin in a manner beffitting his talents. But (a) summers were for smart-kid camp so that he could further his learning and (b) a real job would distract him from his real work, which was becoming an ever-larger repository of knowledge, and (c) Colin didn't really have any marketable skills. One rarely comes across, for instance, the following want ad:

The problem is that I am secretly in love with Hassan. I can't help myself. I hold your bony shoulder blades in my hands and think of his fleshy back (Lindsey).

I expertly angled my raison bran to accomodate the g-forces.

All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "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.

But there was nothing I could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intra cranial firecrackers

The iepen throw confetti to greet the spring.

The nature of the love between a parent and child really is literally stronger than death. As long as either person in that relationship is alive, that relationship is still alive.

Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond.

Are you trying to be subtle? Because I know you're talking about the honeybunnyless prom tragedy that is my life.

He liked the idea of coffee quite a lot - a warm drink that gave you energy and had been for centuries associated with sophisticates and intellectuals. But coffee itself tasted to him like caffeinated stomach bile.

I want to have scrambled eggs for dinner without this ridiculous construction that a scrambled egg-inclusive meal is breakfast even when it occurs at dinnertime."
"You've gotta pick your battles in this world, Hazel," my mom said. "But if this is the issue you want to champion, we will stand behind you.

We are not as frail as the strings would make us believe.

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." Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside

To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman.
And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.

It never seemed like the right time. But of course, it never is the right time.

Leaving senior year like:
its hard to leave to you leave, then its the eased goddam thing you've ever done.

What about the rest of your life?"
She shrugged. "What about it?"
"Aren't you worried about, like, forever?"
"Forever is composed of nows," she says.

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

Honestly, everything else aside, I like finding stuff out about her. I mean, that I didn't know before. I had no idea who she really was. I honestly never thought of her as anything but my crazy beautiful friend who does all the crazy beautiful things.

So Zeno is most famous for his tortoise paradox. Let us imagine that you are in a race with a tortoise. The tortoise has a ten-yard head start. In the time it takes you to run that ten yards, the tortoise has moved one yard. And then in the time it takes you to make up that distance, the tortoise goes a bit farther, and so on forever. You are faster than the tortoise but you can never catch him; you can only decrease his lead.

Tiny decides to ignore me, and he tells Jane that he hopes one day to have enough texts from Will Grayson to turn them into a book, because his texts are like poetry.

Before I can stop myself, I say, "'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day' becomes 'u r hawt like august.

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. a

If people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricaine

I kept it for myself like a keepsake, as if sharing the memory might lead to its dissipation.

Seriously, don't even get me started on my hot bod. You don't want to see me naked, Dave. seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace's breath away

I love you present tense.

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.

Since the only thing i can really count on in life is that whenever i turn on the tv there will be a law & order episode. this

You've got a lifetime to mull over the Buddhist understanding of interconnectedness." He spoke every sentence as if he'd written it down, memorized it, and was now reciting it. "But while you were looking out the window, 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," he said, nodding toward the lake and beyond.'
~Dr. Hyde, pg 50

I hated my body. It disgusted me--its hair, its pinpricks of sweat, its scrawniness. Skin pulled over a skeleton, an animated corpse. I wanted out--out of my body, out of my thoughts, out--but I was stuck inside of this thing, just like all the bacteria colonizing me.

Even though I'd never been in love, I knew what it was like to be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated by it, the way my grandmother talked about God being everywhere. When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it.

Uh-uh, dude. I tried it your way with the dating and the girls and the kissing and the drama, and man, I didn't like it. Plus, my best friend is a walking cautionary tale of what happens to you when romantic relationships don't involve marriage. Like you always say, kafir, everything ends in breakup, divorce, or death. I want to narrow my misery options to divorce or death - that's all.

She loved so much misteries tha she became one

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.

Our fearless shall be our secret weapon

Teenagers think they're invincible

Are you currently at your house?" he asked.
"Um, no," I said.
"That was a trick question. I knew the answer, because I am currently at your house.

Of course I'd long known that I was playing host to a massive collection of parasitic organisms, but I didn't much like being reminded of it. By cell count, humans are approximately 50 percent microbial, meaning that half the cells that make you up are not yours at all. There are something like thousand times more microbes living in my particular biome than there are human beings on earth, and it often feels like I can feel them living and breeding and dying in and on me. I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and tried to control my breathing. Admittedly, I have some anxiety problems, but I would argue it isn't irrational to be concerned about the fact that you are a skin-encased bacterial colony.

Whatever, bro. We both had a long day. Too much drama. I'll TTYS. I wanted to ridicule him for using chatspeak IRL, but I found myself lacking the energy.

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?

No, its not, because you can see into the future if you have basic understanding of how people are likely to act.

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

And I love her. And she promised. She promised me always.

A gentle reminder: Isaac is in the midst of a psychotic episode.

I felt kind of sick for some reason,

This is what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories.

I've got a theory about uniforms. I think they design them so that you become, like, a nonperson, so that you're not Daisy Ramirez, a Human Being, but instead a thing that brings people pizza and exchanges their tickets for plastic dinosaurs. It's like the uniform is designed to hide me.

Life is not a wish granting factory.

The consequences of being un-cool feel so big that a lot of times you end of not finding ways to have open and honest conversations.

As he held her by the waist,she leaned forward,her pouty lips parted,her head just slightly tilted,and eveloped his mouth with such passion that I felt I should look away but couldn't.