John Green Quotes - Page 5

When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself.

Thank you for letting me hijack your wish', I said.'Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa," he said.

Sorry," I said to the Duke."Eh, it's not your fault. It's Carla's fault. You were turning the wheel. Carla just wasn't listening. I knew I shouldn't have loved her. She's like all the others, Tobin; as soon as I confess my love, she abandons me."I laughed. "I never abandoned you," I said patting on her back."Yeah, well, (a.) I never confessed my love to you, and (b.) I'm not even female to you.

One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home ... With this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.

I can't go to Amsterdam. One of my doctors thinks it's a bad idea."He was quiet for a second. "God," he said. "I should've just paid for it myself. Should've just taken you straight from the Funky Bones to Amsterdam.""But then I would've had a probably fatal episode of deoxygenation in Amsterdam, and my body would have been shipped home in the cargo hold of an airplane," I said. "Well, yeah," he said. "But before that, my grand romantic gesture would have totally gotten me laid."I laughed pretty hard, hard enought that I felt where the chest tube had been. "You laugh because it's true," he said.I laughed again."It's true, isn't it!" "Probably not," I said, and then after a moment added, "although you never know.

You don’t get to have an opinion on whether .999… is equal to 1, for instance. It is equal to 1. People smarter than us have worked hard to figure this stuff out, and we owe it to them and to the universe to respect what they’ve figured out.

As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist.

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.

She's cute, I thought, but you don't need to like a girl who treats you like you're ten: You've already got a mom.

I dislike the phrase 'Internet friends,' because it implies that people you know online aren't really your friends, that somehow the friendship is less real or meaningful to you because it happens through Skype or text messages. The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance.

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.

How you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do.

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.

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the Queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.

The world," he said, "is not a wish-granting factory," and then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness.

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

My thoughts are stars I can't fanthom into constellations.

Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.

We care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That’s how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too.

. . . 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.

It's funny how they thought we were dating," Colin said, glancing over at her."How's that funny?" she asked, holding his gaze."Um," he said. Distracted from the road, Colin watched as she gave him the slightest version of her inimitable smile.

..if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was ahurricane.

We just did an awesome job of not dying.

Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re gonna do. I’m just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.”t“Huh?” I asked.t“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, “I won’t be a mother anymore.” The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relationship survives. (It changes, but it survives.)

The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.

You gave me forever within the numbered days.

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library.

It's hard as hell to hold onto your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes, and that's what I was thinking about as we hunted for bad guys through the ruins of a city that didn't exist.

The humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show them how we feel.

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

(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

Everything's uglier up close.Not you.

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

Augustus," I said. "Really. You don't have to do this.""Sure I do," he said. "I found my Wish.""God, you're the best," I told him."I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel," he answered.

There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came. His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. “My name is Augustus Waters,” he said. “I’m seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I’m just here today at Isaac’s request.”“And how are you feeling?” asked Patrick.“Oh, I’m grand.” Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.

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.

The end occurred mostly in her whispers and his silence - because he couldn't whisper and they didn't want to wake Colin's parents. They succeeded in staying quiet, in part because it felt like the air had been shocked out of him. Paradoxically, he felt as if his getting dumped was the only thing happening on the entire dark and silent planet, and also as if it weren't happening at all. He felt himself drifting away from the one-sided whispered conversation, wondering if maybe everything big and heartbreaking and incomprehensible is a paradox.

You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

You can’t burn down a made-up place.

I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I'd never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote ("NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,

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

We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads.So too often what passes for literary criticism is "I couldn't picture that guy", or "I liked that part", or "this part shouldn't have happened." That is, we've left language so far behind that sometimes we judge quality solely based on a story's actions.So we can appreciate a novel that constructs its conflicts primarily through plot - the layered ambiguity of a fatal car accident caused by a vehicle owned by Gatsby but driven by someone else, for instance. But in this image-drenched world, sometimes we struggle to appreciate and celebrate books where the quality arises not exclusively from plot but also from the language itself.

So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay.-- Robert Frost

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

You could hold me and I could hold you. And it would be so peaceful. Completely peaceful. Like the feeling of sleep, but awake in it together.

Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? I mean, I've always felt like the Katherines dump me right when they start to see what I look like from the inside.

She laughed. ''You seem pretty normal.''''You've never seen Ben snort Sprite up his nose and then spit it out of his mouth,'' I said.''I look like a demented carbonated fountain,'' he deadpanned.

There's no romance in geometry," Lindsey answered. "Just you wait.

If the inevitably of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does.

I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.

... 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.

I just want you to be happy. If that’s with me or with someone else or with nobody. I just want you to be happy.

I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going.

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.

It occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because the is always the thought that everything might be done better and again

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.

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true… Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.

I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don't fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don't want to see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big...mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.