John Green Quotes

Because you’re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.

~ John Green

I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me.

~ John Green

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.

~ John Green

I didn't really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia.

~ John Green

Why had Ovid lived in Ancient Rome in 20 BCE23 and not Chicago in 2006 CE? Would Ovid still have been Ovid if he had lived in America? No, he wouldn’t have been, because he would have been a Native American or possibly an American Indian or a First Person or an Indigenous Person, and they did not have Latin or any other kind of written language then. So did Ovid matter because he was Ovid or because he lived in Ancient Rome?

~ John Green

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.

~ John Green

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.

~ John Green

I thought of the one thing about home that I missed, my dad's study with its built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves sagging with thick biographies and the black leather chair that kept me just uncomfortable enough to keep from feeling sleepy as I read.

~ John Green

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

~ John Green

I’m not up for laughing, but their laughter makes the room feel safer, so we begin to explore.

~ John Green

These are all direct quotes, except every time they use a curse word, I'm going to use the name of a famous American poet:'You Walt Whitman-ing, Edna St. Vincent Millay! Go Emily Dickinson your mom!''Thanks for the advice, you pathetic piece of E.E. Cummings, but I think I'm gonna pass.''You Robert Frost-ing Nikki Giovanni! Get a life, nerd. You're a virgin.''Hey bro, you need to go outside and get some fresh air into you. Or a girlfriend.'I need to get a girlfriend into me? I think that shows a fundamental lack of comprehension about how babies are made.

~ John Green

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

~ John Green

Everything's uglier up close.Not you.

~ John Green

Hey,' he said, touching my waist. 'Hey. It's okay.' I nodded and wiped my face with the back of my hand. 'He sucks.' I nodded again. 'I'll write you an epilogue,' Gus said. That made me cry harder. 'I will,' he said. 'I will. Better than any sh*t that drunk could write. His brain is Swiss cheese. He doesn't even remember writing the book. I can write ten times the story that guy can. There will be blood and guts and sacrifice. An Imperial Affliction meets The Prince of Dawn. You'll love it.' I kept nodding, faking a smile, and then he hugged me, his strong arms pulling me into his muscular chest, and I sogged up his polo shirt a little but then recovered enough to speak.

~ John Green

NOTHING HAS EVER LOOKED LIKE THAT EVER IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY,” he said. His enthusiasm was adorable. I couldn’t resist leaning over to kiss him on the cheek.“Just so you know, I’m right here,” Mom said. “Sitting next to you. Your mother. Who held your hand as you took your first infantile steps.”“It’s friendly,” I reminded her, turning to kiss her on the cheek.“Didn’t feel too friendly,” Gus mumbled just loud enough for me to hear. When surprised and excited and innocent Gus emerged from Grand Gesture Metaphorically Inclined Augustus, I literally could not resist.

~ John Green

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

~ John Green

If you dont' live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good.

~ John Green

But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?-Aza

~ John Green

Love is always a miracle, everywhere, every time.

~ John Green

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never get struck by lightning, 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.

~ John Green

No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.

~ John Green

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

~ John Green

Photographs are just light and time - Aza Holmes

~ John Green

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

~ John Green

And yet still I worried. I like being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

~ John Green

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

~ John Green

Because you simply cannot draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.

~ John Green

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

~ John Green

we need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken

~ John Green

That didn't happen, of course. Things never happenedlike I imagined them.

~ John Green

There is always the risk: something is good and good and good, and then all at once it gets awkward. All at once, she sees you looking at her, and then she doesn't want to seem flirty, because she doesn't want you to think she likes you. It's such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away all the wall of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle--oh, look, we broke down this wall, I'm going to look at you like a girl and you're going to look like me like a boy and we're going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About There What About There. And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself that it's not the middle but will last forever.

~ John Green

I want to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn't planning or doing or leaving, the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together.

~ John Green

The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank's name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. FOUR. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around.

~ John Green

I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness...I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still that think that, sometimes, maybe the afterlife is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter...I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take her 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 there 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...energy is never created and never destroyed. We cannot be born and cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations... Thomas Edison's last words were: It's very beautiful over there. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.

~ John Green

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

~ John Green

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

~ John Green

Maybe life is not about accomplishing some bullshit markers.

~ John Green

I missed the future.

~ John Green

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.

~ John Green

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

~ John Green