John Green Quotes

638 Sourced Quotes

If you are rich, you have to be an idiot not to stay rich. And if you are poor, you have to be really smart to get rich.

John Green
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.

John Green
You like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.

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
Like all sick children,' he answered dispassionately, 'you say you don't want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.

John Green
Did I help you toward a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I just assist in your willful self-destruction?

John Green
Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.

John Green
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.

John Green
[Twilight] argues that true love will triumph in the end, which may or may not be true, but if it's a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have.

John Green
I'm really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what.

John Green
If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be my flowers.

John Green
The Colonel explained to me that 1. this was Alaska's room, and that 2. she had a single room because the girl who was supposed to be her roommate got kicked out at the end of last year, and that 3. Alaska had cigarettes, although the Colonel neglected to ask whether 4. I smoked, which 5. I didn't.

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
And even though he felt pitiful and ridiculous, he didn't want it to end, because he knew the absence of her would hurt more than any breakup ever could.

John Green
And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.

John Green
In the end, I had to call myself a faggot, which really annoyed me, because 1. I don't think that word should ever be used by anyone, let alone me, and 2. As it happens, I am not gay, and furthermore, 3. Chuck Parson made it out like calling yourself a faggot was the ultimate humiliation, even though there's nothing at all embarrassing about being gay.

John Green
Hey Pudge," the Colonel said. "What do you think of a truce?" "It reminds me of when the Germans demanded that the U.S. surrender at the Battle of the Bulge," I said. "I guess I'd say to this truce offer what General McAuliffe said to that one: Nuts.

John Green
You know what I hate? The outdoors. I mean, generally. I don't like outside. I'm an inside person. I'm all about refrigeration and indoor plumbing and Judge Judy.

John Green
There's no way of knowing that your last good day is Your Last Good Day. At the time, it is just another good day.

John Green
Maybe some people need to believe in a proper and omnipotent God to pray, but I don't.

John Green
Take a picture of this so Isaac can see it when they invent robot eyes.

John Green
"And we'll call you... hmmm. Pudge."
"Huh?"
"Pudge," the Colonel said. "Because you're skinny. It's called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now, let's go get some cigarettes and start this year off right."

John Green
But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)

John Green
The minister said, Let us pray, but as everyone else bowed their head, I could only stare slack-jawed at the sight of Peter Van Houten. After a moment, he whispered, We gotta fake pray, and bowed his head.

John Green