Peter Van Houten Quotes

Dad always told me that you can judge people by the way they treat waiters and assistants. By this measure, Peter Van Houten was possibly the world's douchiest douche. ~ John Green

The minister said, "Let us pray," but as everyone else bowed their head, I could only stare slack-jawed at the sight of Peter Van Houten. After a moment, he whispered, "We gotta fake pray," and bowed his head. ~ John Green

Dear Mr. Peter Van Houten
(c/o Lidewij Vliegenthart),

My name is Hazel Grace Lancaster. My friend Augustus Waters, who read An Imperial Affliction at my recommendationtion, just received an email from you at this address. I hope you will not mind that Augustus shared that email with me.

Mr. Van Houten, I understand from your email to Augustus that you are not planning to publish any more books. In a way, I am disappointed, but I'm also relieved: I never have to worry whether your next book will live up to the magnificent perfection of the original. As a three-year survivor of Stage IV cancer, I can tell you that you got everything right in An Imperial Affliction. Or at least you got me right. Your book has a way of telling me what I'm feeling before I even feel it, and I've reread it dozens of times.

I wonder, though, if you would mind answering a couple questions I have about what happens after the end of the novel. I understand the book ends because Anna dies or becomes too ill to continue writing it, but I would really like to mom-wether she married the Dutch Tulip Man, whether she ever has another child, and whether she stays at 917 W. Temple etc. Also, is the Dutch Tulip Man a fraud or does he really love them? What happens to Anna's friends-particularly Claire and Jake? Do they stay that this is the kind of deep and thoughtful question you always hoped your readers would ask-what becomes of Sisyphus the Hamster? These questio ~ John Green

Wow," I said. "Are you making this up?"
"Hazel Grace, could I, with my meager intellectual capacities, make up a letter from Peter Van Houten featuring phrases like 'our triumphantly digitized contemporaneity'?"
"You could not," I allowed. "Can I, can I have the email address?"
"Of course," Augustus said, like it was not the best gift ever. ~ John Green

The shirt was a screen print of a famous Surrealist artwork by René Magritte in which he drew a pipe and then beneath it wrote in cursive Ceci n'est pas une pipe. ("This is not a pipe.")

"I just don't get that shirt," Mom said.

"Peter Van Houten will get it, trust me.

There are like seven thousand Magritte references in An Imperial Affliction."

"But it is a pipe."

"No, it's not," I said. "It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever."

"How did you get so grown up that you understand things that confuse your ancient mother?" Mom asked. "It seems like just yes-terday that I was telling seven-year-old Hazel why the sky was blue. You thought I was a genius back then."

"Why is the sky blue?" I asked.

"Cuz," she answered. I laughed. ~ John Green

She didn't understand why it was happening," he said. "I had to tell her she would die. Her social worker said I had to tell her. I had to tell her she would die, so I told her she was going to heaven. She asked if I would be there, and I said that I would not, not yet. But eventually, she said, and I promised that yes, of course, very soon. And I told her that in the meantime we had great family up there that would take care of her. And she asked me when I would be there, and I told her soon. Twenty-two years ago. ~ John Green

Peter Van Houten was the only person I'd ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it's
like to be dying, and (b) not have died. ~ John Green

Van Houten nodded and said, "Did you close the deal with that chick yet?" Whereupon I encountered for the first and only time a truly speechless Augustus Waters. "I," he started, "um, I, Hazel, um. Well." "This boy appears to have some kind of developmental delay," Peter Van Houten said to Lidewij. ~ John Green

Where is my chance to be somebody's Peter Van Houten?' He hit the steering wheel weakly, the car honking as he cried. He leaned his head back, looking up. 'I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me fucking die. ~ John Green

My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn't like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you withthis weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read thebook. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.It wasn't even that the book was so good or anything; it was just that the author, Peter Van Houten, seemed to understand me in weird and impossible ways. An Imperial Affliction was my book, in the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts. ~ John Green

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 ~ John Green

It would be Spiderman. I'd love to be Peter Parker. ~ Casper Van Dien

His memory is compromised,' Lidewij said. 'If only my memory would compromise,' Van Houten responded. ~ John Green

I'm cold in summer. I'm the coldest person ever! It's very ironic I'm never cold in the scripts. Every time I'm shooting, if you don't see a part of me, there are hot water bottles there. ~ Carice Van Houten

My father is a silent cinema freak, so he took me to 1925 silent films that took forever, like 5-hour movies, but I've seen a lot of that stuff since I was young. And then I saw the film 'Annie,' and I just wanted to be Annie; I just wanted to be that orphan kid and wanted to sing and dance. ~ Carice Van Houten

I don't believe you can get into somebody's character but more that somebody comes in you. You just use yourself. In everything I play, I feel like it is me. I just say different things on different times and look different. ~ Carice Van Houten

When the ANSI C standard was under development, the pragma directive was introduced. Borrowed from Ada, #pragma is used to convey hints to the compiler, such as the desire to expand a particular function in-line or suppress range checks. Not previously seen in C, pragma met with some initial resistance from a gcc implementor, who took the "implementation-defined" effect very literally - in gcc version 1.34, the use of pragma causes the compiler to stop compiling and launch a computer game instead! The gcc manual contained the following: The "#pragma" command is specified in the ANSI standard to have an arbitrary implementation-defined effect. In the GNU C preprocessor, "#pragma" first attempts to run the game "rogue"; if that fails, it tries to run the game "hack"; if that fails, it tries to run GNU Emacs displaying the Tower of Hanoi; if that fails, it reports a fatal error. In any case, preprocessing does not continue. - Manual for version 1.34 of the GNU C compiler ~ Peter Van Der Linden

Most directors that I've worked with - I've worked with before, especially in Holland - and they know that I'm somebody who talks and asks, and talks, and talks, and talks and questions and turns things around. I'm like a little cat, walking around my little nest until I find my place. ~ Carice Van Houten

At some point, for all eternity, there will be no more unmerited suffering: this present darkness, "the age of evil", will eventually be remembered as a brief flicker at the beginning of human history. Every evil done by the wicked to the innocent will have been avenged, and every tear will have been wiped away ~ Peter Van Inwagen

Playing evil is just not interesting. I don't think anyone who does evil stuff thinks they're doing evil stuff. That's the scary part. ~ Carice Van Houten

What is a priest doing being a doctor geology?" said Du Pre.

Father Van Den Heuvel turned back from his diggings.

"The Catholic Church," he said, "favors education as the only way to fight off good ideas. They have gotten good at it, having been fighting off good ideas for the last millenium and a half, and they don't learn. ~ Peter Bowen, Nails

You certainly wouldn't want to invest much time in an argument with someone who would believe it in the first place. ~ Peter Van Inwagen

VAN HOUTEN!" I shouted. "Are you okay? Was that a cough?" "Kaitlyn, I love you. You are a genius. I have to go. ~ John Green

It looks to me as if Darwinians are like someone who, having observed that tugboats sometimes maneuver ocean liners in tight places by directing high-pressure streams of water at them, concludes that he has discovered the method by which the liners cross the Atlantic. ~ Peter Van Inwagen

There's always a Van der Graaf audience that wants to hear the band's sound. And totally fair enough. Why not? It's a band. You like the band, you like the band. ~ Peter Hammill

Arnie pulls at my T-shirt. I shove his hand away. He pushes down the toilet handle and the bathroom fills with that flush sound. Tucker says, "You taking a dump?"
"No."
"Liar. I heard the flush. You were taking a dump."
"But I ... "
"I just wish you'd admit it. We got to be honest with each other."
"But ... "
"I heard the flush, Gilbert. You can't fool Tucker Van Dyke. ~ Peter Hedges

Your grandfather were a quiet and secret man he had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Diemen's Land I do not know what was done to him he never spoke of it. When they had finished with their tortures they set him free and he crossed the sea to the colony of Victoria. He were by this time 30 yr. of age red headed and freckled with his eyes always slitted against the sun. My da had sworn an oath to evermore avoid the attentions of the law so when he saw the streets of Melbourne was crawling with policemen worse than flies he walked 28 mi. to the township of Donnybrook and then or soon thereafter he seen my mother. Ellen Quinn were 18 yr. old she were dark haired and slender the prettiest figure on a horse he ever saw but your grandma was like a snare laid out by God for Red Kelly. She were a Quinn and the police would never leave the Quinns alone. ~ Peter Carey

I have a very musical family from my Scottish roots. ~ Carice Van Houten

When I started acting, there were parts in English that I thought I just had to try it out and go to another country. I did a film in Ireland. It was my first film abroad. ~ Carice Van Houten

What if Van Gogh had taken medication for his mental illness? Would the world have been deprived of a great artist? ~ Peter D. Kramer

People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. ~ John Green

We told Mom about the Anne Frank House, leaving out the kissing.
"Did you go back to chez Van Houten afterward?" Mom asked.
Augustus didn't even give me time to blush.
"Nah, we just hung out at a café. Hazel amused me with some Venn diagram humor."
He glanced at me. God, he was sexy. ~ John Green

I think it's a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit. ~ Jeremy Clarkson

Determinism is the thesis that is true at every moment that the way things then are determines a unique future, that only one of the alternative futures that may exist relative to a given moment is a physically possible continuation of the state of things at the moment. Or, if you like, we may say that determinism is the thesis that only one continuation of the state of things at a given moment is consistent with the laws of nature. ~ Peter Van Inwagen

I never believed in going to America with my show-reel and knocking on every agent's door. I couldn't even do it. I'm too insecure, and too proud. It's a strange combination. ~ Carice Van Houten

I will never forget the moment when Peter van Pels and I saw a group of selected men. Among those men was Peter's father. The men were marched away. Two hours later, a lorry came by, loaded with their clothing. ~ Otto Frank

Peter Rabbit's not a rabbit. Peter Rabbit is a proxy for the child who reads the book, and they imagine themselves in the rabbit's position. ~ Chris Van Allsburg

New problems: Mrs. Van Daan is desperate, talks about a bullet through her head, prison, hanging, and suicide. She's jealous that Peter confides in me and not her. ~ Anne Frank

It used to be widely held that evil was incompatible with the existence of God: that no possible world contained both God and evil. So far as I am able tell, this thesis is no longer defended ~ Peter Van Inwagen

That is why I took up the gun - not to shoot, not to kill, not to destroy, but to stop those who would do evil, to protect the vulnerable, to defend democratic values, to stand up for the freedom we have to talk ... about how we can make the world a better place. ~ Peter Van Uhm

As one Iraqi said, "It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head. Everyone comes in and helps put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked. ~ Peter Van Buren

In theater, the scenes I like the most are the ones where you are there and you cannot talk. ~ Carice Van Houten

Van Houten was still staring at the ceiling beams. He took a drink. The glass was almost empty again. 'Lidewij, I can't do it. I can't. I can't.' He leveled his gaze to me. 'Nothing happens to the Dutch Tulip Man. He isn't a con man or not a con man; he's God. He's an obvious and unambiguous metaphorical representation of God, and asking what becomes of him if the intellectual equivalent of asking what becomes of the disembodied eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in Gatsby. Do he and Anna's man get married? We are speaking of a novel, dear child, not some historical enterprise. ~ John Green

In my own country, I play light comedies and funny parts. ~ Carice Van Houten

I knew always that Holland gave away the most Jews of all the countries. We are not the heroes that are in the history books. ~ Carice Van Houten

More people seem to know the Van der Graaf Generator material than my solo work - thanks, I suppose, to their parents' lingering vinyl collections. ~ Peter Hammill

Van Houten, I'm a good person but a shitty writer. you're a shitty person but a good writer. ~ John Green

What else? She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don't get to choose 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

No, I'm not afraid, except when it comes to things about myself, but I'm working on that. ~ Anne Frank

I want to leave a mark.

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

I think it's cool people love to hate me. ~ Carice Van Houten

As a city powered by our country's knowledge economy, Toronto will continue to benefit from developing, attracting and retaining the world's most promising young researchers at the University of Toronto. Our government will continue to invest in research awards that lead to long-term social and economic benefits for Canadians. ~ Peter Van Loan

I think I'm a very intuitive actress. ~ Carice Van Houten

In some respects Abbott proved to be the id of Australia's modern conservative movement: hyper-adversarial, willing to occupy itself in opposition to whatever social issues were preoccupying the left. Owing more to American political culture than the British inheritance Abbott claimed to value, contemporary Australian conservatism makes the grave error of believing in things other than power and stability. ~ Peter Van Onselen

I'm a singer and working on my second album. I write and produce. There is so much more that satisfies me. So there's not just this one ambition to become an American movie star. Because I will never become an American movie star. ~ Carice Van Houten

I personally don't like to rehearse so much. I really trust my instincts. I like to talk and talk and talk until we have to do it. I feel the same about theater. ~ Carice Van Houten