John Green Quotes

I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.

~ John Green

The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.

~ John Green

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going.

~ John Green

Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seem running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God.

~ John Green

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.

~ John Green

What the hell is that? I laughed.It's my fox hat.Your fox hat?Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat.Why are you wearing your fox hat? I asked.Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox.

~ John Green

Headline? he asked.'Swing Set Needs Home,' I said.'Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,' he said.'Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,' I said.

~ John Green

As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.

~ John Green

I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)

~ John Green

Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.

~ John Green

Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.

~ John Green

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!

~ John Green

I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn't hate people who watched or played them.

~ John Green

Well, while you were in the bathroom, I sat down at this picnic table here in Bumblefug, Kentucky, and noticed that someone had carved that GOD HATES FAG, which, aside from being a grammatical nightmare, is absolutely ridiculous. So I'm changing it to 'God Hates Baguettes.' It's tough to disagree with that. Everybody hates baguettes.

~ John Green

Just move to the Internet, its great here. We get to live inside where the weather is always awesome.

~ John Green

Dude, I don’t want to talk about Lacey’s prom shoes. And I’ll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It’s called a penis.

~ John Green

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.

~ John Green

Every year, many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you.

~ John Green

As far as I can tell, there are two basic (kissing) rules: 1. Don't bite anything without permission. 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful, and should be used sparingly.

~ John Green

Principled hate is a hell of a lot stronger than Boy, I wish you hadn't mummified me and thrown me into the lake hate.

~ John Green

The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness:'I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.

~ John Green

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.

~ John Green

He specialized in the murder of dreams, Hazel Grace...

~ John Green

Dear Teens at Starbucks wearing 'Abstain from Sex 2 Attain Ur Goals' t-shirts: Doesn't it depend on what my goals are?

~ John Green

But I was not in the band, because I suffer from the kind of tone deafness that is generally associated with actual deafness

~ John Green

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.

~ John Green

Something about telling that story made my gut grow back together.What?Oh, nothing. Just thinking out loud.That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.The people who've been in your secret hiding places.The people you bite your thumb in front of.Hi.Hi.......Wow. My first Lindsey.My second Colin.That was fun. Let's try it again.Sold.............

~ John Green

Chuck Parson did not participate in organized sports, because to do so would distract from his larger goal of his life: to one day be convicted of murder

~ John Green

Imagine others complexly.

~ John Green

Ben, if you get pee in my brand-new car, I am going to cut your balls off.Still peeing, Ben looks over at me smirking. You´re gonna need a hell of a big knife, bro.

~ John Green

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

~ John Green

All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.

~ John Green

Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.

~ John Green

Suffering can bend & break us. But it can also break us open to become the persons God intended us to be. It depends on what we do with the pain. If we offer it back to God, He will use it to do great things in us & through us, because suffering is fertile... it an grow new life.

~ John Green

he is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with. i have to believe that’s a sign.

~ John Green

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.

~ John Green

We all romanticize the people we adore.

~ John Green

If you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain.

~ John Green

I’m in love with you, and I’m not in thebusiness 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 returnedto dust, and I know the sun will swallowthe only earth we’ll ever have, and I amin love with you.

~ John Green

No, I don’t think you’re gonna be single forever, and also I don’t understand your obsession with romantic love. There are other ways to have fulfilling relationships that can sustain you and make your life great and fun other than having a sexualized relationship. It’s not the only kind of fulfilling human interaction. So, even if you are single forever, that doesn’t mean that you’ve had some kind of failed life.

~ John Green