John Green Quotes

638 Sourced Quotes

Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.

John Green
But as for me: I must ask the wounded man where he is hurt, because I cannot become the wounded man. The only wounded man I can be is me.

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
Like the way the sun is right now, with the long shadows, and that kind of bright, soft light you get when the sun isn't quite setting? That's the light that makes everything better, everything prettier, and today, everything just seemed to be in that light.

John Green
I've always sort of preferred people who are not entirely likable.

John Green
The world went on, as it does, without my full participation, and I only woke up from the reverie when someone said my name.

John Green
And I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, 'This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.

John Green
All at once, I couldn't figure out why I was methodically tossing a spherical object through a toroidal object. It seemed like the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing.

John Green
Cause I'm just - I want to go to Amsterdam, and I want him to tell me what happens after the book is over, and I just don't want my particular life, and also the sky is depressing me, and there is this old swing set out here that my dad made for me when I was a kid.' 'I must see this old swing set of tears immediately,' he said. 'I'll be over in twenty minutes.

John Green
"It's a penis," Margo said, "in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state: it may have an illustrious history, but it sure isn't big."

John Green
She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth.

John Green
It's not fair, I said. It's just so goddamned unfair. The world, he said, is not a wishgranting factory,

John Green
I'm a bad boyfriend. She's a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other.

John Green
So Zeno is most famous for his tortoise paradox. Let us imagine that you are in a race with a tortoise. The tortoise has a ten-yard head start. In the time it takes you to run that ten yards, the tortoise has moved one yard. And then in the time it takes you to make up that distance, the tortoise goes a bit farther, and so on forever. You are faster than the tortoise but you can never catch him; you can only decrease his lead.

John Green
And then I screwed up and the Colonel screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers.

John Green
What happened?" "During the kiss?" "No, with you and Caroline." "Oh," he said. And then after a second, "Caroline is no longer suffering from personhood.

John Green
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.

John Green
We all miss you so much. It just never ends. It feels like we were all wounded in your battle, Caroline. I miss you. I love you.

John Green
The Colonel's hand was so little, and I grabbed it tight, his cold seeping into me and my warmth into him. 'I memorized the populations,' he said.

John Green
So how's it going? Okay. Glad to be home, I guess. Gus told me you were in the ICU? Yeah, I said. Sucks, he said. I'm a lot better now, I said. I'm going to Amsterdam tomorrow with Gus. I know. I'm pretty well up-to-date on your life, because Gus never. Talks. About. Anything. Else.

John Green
She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.

John Green
It was not an eventful day. I should have done extraordinary things. I should have sucked the marrow out of life. But on that day, I slept eighteen hours out of a possible twenty-four.

John Green
I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.

John Green
I could try to pretend that I didn't care anymore, but it could never be true again. 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.

John Green
We acknowledge that being the person God made you cannot separate you from God's love.

John Green
It's embarrassing that we all just walk through life blindly accepting that scrambled eggs are fundamentally associated with mornings.

John Green
I like this world. I like drinking champagne. I like not smoking. I like Dutch people speaking Dutch.

John Green
But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

John Green
It just goes to show, if you try to ruin someone's life, it only gets better. You just don't get to be a part of it.

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