John Green Quotes - Page 9

Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.

Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.

Caroline was always moody and miserable, but I liked it. I liked feeling as if she had chosen me as the only person in the world not to hate, and so we spent all this time together just ragging on everyone, you know?

How will we ever get out of the labyrinth of suffering ?

The Colonel led all the cheers.Cornbread!" he screamed.CHICKEN!" the crowd responded.Rice!"PEAS!"And then, all together: "WE GOT HIGHER SATs."Hip Hip Hip Hooray!" the Colonel cried.YOU'LL BE WORKIN' FOR US SOMEDAY!

The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all.

And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future-you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can't afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.

AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!' he screamed.'So that's Sara,' I said.'Yes.''She seems nice.

I am a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you: You're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay?"I'm going to go to my room and read for awhile, okay? I'm fine. I really am fine: I just want to go read for a while.

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

You just gotta tell her, man,’ I said. ‘You just gotta say, “Angela, I really like you, but there’s something you need to know: when we go to my house and hook up, we’ll be watched by the twenty-four hundred eyes of twelve hundred black Santas.

Kafir, you have a very complicated problem with a very simple solution.

He was gone and did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth.

Issac:"I dislike living in a world without Augustus Waters."Computer: "I don't understand-"Issac: "Me neither. Pause

It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing unattainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness wh's kind of bossy--then I had to basically start liking a whole different person.

...everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.

All right. The snow may be falling in the winter of my discontent, but at least I've got sarcastic company.

But of course, the universe does not conspire to put you in one place rather than another.

I felt bashful, like I had when I'd first told him of An Imperial Affliction. "Um, okay. Okay. 'Let us go, trough certain half-deserted streets,/ The muttering retreats/ Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/ and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:/ Streets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent/ To lead you to an overwhelming question../Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"/ Let us go and make our visit" "I'm in love with you," he said quietly. "Augustus," I said. "I am, " he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you." "Augustus," I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this wierdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back. I couldn't say it back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.

He wanted to draw out the moment before the moment- because as good as kissing feels, nothing feels as good as the anticipation of it.

The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.

It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.

I worked hard to meet his eyes, even though they were the kind of pretty that’s hard to look at..

We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.

We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. Augustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer. He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim - as you will be - of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible.

You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I can't remember, because I never knew.

We need never to be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken.

She loves mysteries so much, she became one.

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

I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.

He’s not that smart.”“She’s right,” Augustus says. “It’s just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations.”“Right, it’s primarily his hotness.”“It can be sort of blinding,” he said.“It actually did blind our friend Isaac.”“Terrible tragedy, that. But can I help my own deadly beauty?”“You cannot.”“It is my burden, this beautiful face.”“Not to mention your body.”“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,” he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.

I felt the worry start to snatch at my breath when I finished talking.

and then I couldn't wait anymore, and my hand was on the back of her head, and then her lips on mine, the cold air gone and replaced with the warmth of her mouth, soft and sweet and hash-brown-tastic

If my public existence does anything worthwhile, hopefully it at least demystifies the author a bit, because I know when I was younger I felt like authors were like wizards or something. Turns out they're total muggles.

I figured something out," he said aloud. "The future is unpredictable."Hassan said, "Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice.

If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all

I didn't know what to say to her - I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.

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

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

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

(...) and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water's death was Augustus Water.

Nerd girls are the world’s most underutilized romantic resource. And guys, do not tell me that nerd girls are not hot because that shows a Paris Hilton-esque failure to understand hotness.

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.

I walked to his bedside table next. Infinite Mayhem. the ninth sequel to The Prince of Dawn, lay atop the table next to his reading lamp, the corner of page 138 turned down. He'd never made it to the end of the book. 'Spoiler alert: Mayhem survives,' I said out loud to him, just in case he could hear me.

I am trying to find ways to live honestly and hopefully in the world without ignoring or denying the universe´s cold and painful indifference to us.

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive

...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.

You will not kill my girlfriend today, International Terrorists of Ambiguous Nationality!

Love is always a miracle, everywhere,every time. But for us, it's a little different. I don't want to say it's more miraculous...Our miracle is different because people say it's impossible.

It's like she thinks my job is to please her, and that should be my dearest wish, and when I don't please her - I get shut out.

There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.

JP shouted, "TELL THEM WHAT YOU JUST DID TO EACH OTHER!""Um," I said."We kissed," the Duke said."That's kinda gay," Keun said."I AM A GIRL.""Yeah, I know, but so is Tobin," Keun said.

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.

He flipped himself onto his side and kissed me. "You're so hot," I said, my hand still on his leg. "I'm starting to think you have an amputee fetish," he answered, still kissing me. I laughed."I have an Augustus Waters fetish," I explained.

Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone's about to die.

You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.

When you date someone, you have the markers along the way, right: You kiss, you have The Talk, you say the Three Little Words, you sit on a swing set and break up. You can plot the points on a graph. And you check up with each other along the way: Can I do this? If I say this, will you say it back?"But with friendship, there's nothing like that. Being in a relationship, that's something you choose. Being friends, that's just something you are.

Human existence is temporary and all the knowledge of the universe we acquire will in time be forgotten because there will be no humans left to benefit from any of the stuff we learned.And yet, this doesn't invalidate scientific exploration to me. We seek to understand the universe because it makes our lives better and more rich. Similarly, we tell stories (and think about why and how to tell stories) because it makes human existence richer. Made-up stories matter. They bring us pleasure and solace and nurture empathy by letting us see the world through others' eyes. They also help us to feel unalone, to understand that our grief and joy is shared not just by those around us but by all those who came before us and all those still yet to come.

That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it.

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