John Green (born August 24, 1977) is an American author, YouTuber, podcaster, and philanthropist. His books have more than 50 million copies in print worldwide, including The Fault in Our Stars (2012), which is one of the best-selling books of all time.
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| As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once. ― John Green |
Here is a collection of John Green most famous quotes: John Green Quotes about hope, life, love, beauty, change, teens, friends, pain and scars. Quotes and sayings on reading, books, humans, infinity, suffering, humor, grief and music by John Green.
John Green Quotes and Sayings
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world.... but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.
I realized during my time as a chaplain that I didn't want to be a minister.
Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.
I'm a very introverted person. Nothing that's happened has changed that, but one of the reasons I write for teens is it's a real privilege to have a seat at the table in the lives of young people when they're figuring out what matters to them.
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
What a slut time is. She screws everybody.
I like to know the places I write about. I feel like it helps me ground the novel. My novels are "realistic novels," but they can also be fantastical, so it's nice to have a setting that grounds them a little bit.
The marks humans leave are too often scars.
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.
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.
Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.
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.
I am still bowled over by this great young adult novel by David Levithan called "Every Day," which is about a character with no gender or body who wakes up every day in the body of a different person. It's a really impressive execution of a really great premise.
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| You can love someone so much... But you can never love people as much as you can miss them. ― John Green |
There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
The world is not a wish-granting factory.
When you're writing a novel, you spend four years sitting in your basement and a year waiting for the book to come out and then you get the feedback. When you do work online, the moment you're finished making it, people start responding to it which is really fun and allows for a kind of community development you just can't have in novels.
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.
You can love someone so much.... But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.
Teenage readers also have a different relationship with the authors whose work they value than adult readers do. I loved Toni Morrison, but I don't have any desire to follow her on Twitter. I just want to read her books.
Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?
I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.
So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.
Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.
It's hard to get movie studios to pay a lot of money for movies that don't have robots or explosions.
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.
What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.
Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.
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| Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. ― John Green |
When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.
Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. 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.
I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.
I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.
Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.
There is a lot of talk in publishing these days that we need to become more like the Internet: We need to make books for short attention spans with bells and whistles - books, in short, that are as much like "Angry Birds" as possible. But I think that's a terrible idea.
It is so hard to leave―until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.
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.
I enjoy writing about people falling in love, probably because I think the first time you fall in love is the first time that you have to figure out how you're going to orient your life. What are you going to value? What's going to be most important to you? And I think that's really interesting to write about.
Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.
That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.
Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.
Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.
I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.
Read a lot. Read broadly.... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored.... Write a lot.
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| You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world... But you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. ― John Green |
It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.
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.
The town was paper, but the memories were not.
They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting.
At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.
When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement.
I didn't need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.
You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.
You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.
What you must understand about me is that I'm a deeply unhappy person.
I think it's crazy, crazy that book tours lose so much money. They shouldn't. Book tours should be part of what keeps independent bookstores vibrant and profitable.
Maybe okay will be our always.
Some people have lives, some people have music.
I may die young, but at least I'll die smart.
If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.
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| What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? ― John Green |
It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.
Teenagers have more intense reading experiences because they've had fewer of them. It's like the first time you fall in love. You have a connection to that first person you fell in love with because it was so intense and unprecedented.
When things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It's because a little piece gets lost - the two remaining ends couldn't fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.
But I believe in true love, you know? I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.
I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.
I always wondered if there was a purpose to the universe, if there was a plan, if there was some sort of organizing factor, hopefully that I played a role in.
Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.
I just did some calculations and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit.
It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.
Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.
We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, "I want to be Kurt Vonnegut."
That's part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence
Maybe there's something you're afraid to say, or someone you're afraid to love, or somewhere you're afraid to go. It's gonna hurt. It's gonna hurt because it matters.
I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?
You can't not like "The Great Gatsby." It's got the best sentences in, like, ever.
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| I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving. ― John Green |
Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.
I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?
We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.
Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.
Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.
I've read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you're a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.
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's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?
Here's to all the places we went. And all the places we'll go. And here's to me, whispering again and again and again and again: I love you.
You like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.
I love making YouTube videos. I love Tumblr, I love Twitter. I love talking with people I find interesting about stuff I find interesting, and the Internet is a great way to do that.
The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.
I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.
When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.
I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.
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| Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. ― John Green |
Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.
And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.
If people could see me the way I see myself - if they could live in my memories - would anyone love me?
The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water's death with was Augustus Waters.
Videogame players essentially choose whether to win the game or to die heroically. There's a certain glory in both.
Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.
Your now is not your forever.
I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.
The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.
As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.
That didn't happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.
The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.
My responsibility is to try to tell true stories. To me a true story is always hopeful, but never simply, uncomplicatedly happy.
You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.
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.
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| The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. ― John Green |
Maybe all the strings inside him broke.
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.
The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.
At some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you'll look back down and see that you floated away, too.
What matters to you defines your mattering.
Caring doesn't sometimes lead to misery. It always does.
Come over here so I can examine your face with my hands and see deeper into your soul than a sighted person ever could.
As much as life can suck, it always beats the alternative.
That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.
There's some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.
We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either.
I'm starting to realize that people 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.
I try to live life so that I can live with myself.
Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon.
You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.
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| The marks humans leave are too often scars. ― John Green |
That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.
And I wanted 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.
It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.
You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape 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.
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.
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.
Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.
And I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, 'This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.
It was nice - in the dark and the quiet.... and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing.
There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.
That smile could end wars and cure cancer.
We all matter - maybe less then a lot but always more than none.
True terror isn't being scared; it's not having a choice on the matter.
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| Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back. ― John Green |
How do you just stop being terrified of getting left behind and ending up by yourself forever and not meaning anything to the world?
After all this time, it seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out—but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.
I've gotten really hot since you went blind.
The Venn diagram of boys who don't like smart girls and boys you don't wanna date is a circle.
Not that smart. Not that hot. Not that nice. Not that funny. That's me: I'm not that.
I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.
I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I loved.
The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.
She loved mysteries so much that she became one.
Everything that comes together falls apart. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you stopped suffering when they did.
But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.
Oh, Wikipedia, with your tension between those who would share knowledge and those who would destroy it.
Being in a relationship, that's something you choose. Being friends, that's just something you are. But I do pick you. We've been friends too long to pick, but if we could pick, I'd pick you.
At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.
Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them.
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| The world is not a wish-granting factory. ― John Green |
Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.
No one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.
The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.
It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.
I'm so proud of you that it makes me proud of me. I hope you know that.
You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.
You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it.
True love will triumph in the end—which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have.
We just did an awesome job of not dying.
Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn't the way they actually are.... People are different when you can smell them and see them up close....
And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I've been smart longer.
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 felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.
You can never love someone as much as you miss them.
Don't you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don't love the crazy, sullen bitch.
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.
Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it.
A paper town for a paper girl.
Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it's worth.
The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.
It's just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.
Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.
Because memories fall apart, too. And you're left with nothing.
You say you're not special because the world doesn't know about you, but that's an insult to me. I know about you.
The problem with happy endings is that they're either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.
The pleasure isn't in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it.
We are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.
I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.
Entropy increases. Things fall apart.
You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.
I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.
This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.
I fell in love like you would fall asleep: slowly and then all at once.
Just move to the Internet, its great here. We get to live inside where the weather is always awesome.
Scared isn't a good excuse. Scared is the excuse everyone has always used.
I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.
What I love about science is that as you learn, you don't really get answers. You just get better questions.
I love you present tense.
I will not tell you our love story, because like all real love stories it will die with us, as it should.
There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn't.
We have this weird thing in the world where you don't get insulted for what you do, you get insulted for who you are.
I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.
I'm really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what.
I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?
Every year, many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you.
All sorts of yayness floods my brain. Love is such a drug.
Do you know what your problem is? You can't live with the idea that someone might leave.
I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars.
To be alive is to be missing.
I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.
I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.
We all use the future to escape the present.
But mothers lie. It's in the job description.
There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.
I thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience.
I don't know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.
When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.
You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different.
I've never known before what it feels like to want someone - not to want to hook up with them or whatever, but to want them, to want them. And now I do. So maybe I do believe in epiphanies.
We are greater than the sum of our parts.
"Is it still cool to go to the mall?" she asked. "I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what's cool," I answered.
Anything that happens all at once is just as likely to unhappen all at once, you know?
I is the hardest word to define.
She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth.
The world wasn't made for us, we were made for the world.
"How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" to a margin note written in her loop-heavy cursive: Straight and Fast.
Everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.
I don't think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing.
Remember that time in the minivan, twenty minutes ago, when we didn't die?
What's the point in being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.
I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.
Why don't we break up? I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that's not an easy thing to do.
They like their coffee like they like their ex-boyfriends: bitter.
We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.
One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.
Shouldn't letting go be painless if you've never learned how to hold on?
Nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.
Love is keeping the promise anyway.
We Play the broken string of our instruments one last time.
The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.