John Green has written many works about teenagers and young people in love. His stories, like The Fault In Our Stars, have deep and personal meaning to their readers. The best part of his quotes is that they are so relatable. Everyone who has ever been in a relationship will find something meaningful in them. Many of his quotes are sad and related to the death of a loved one, but some are very amusing. While John Greenmostly writes about teens, readers of any age can find something that speaks to them. All of John Green’s quotes will make you think about life, death, romance, and friendship in new ways.
The marks humans leave are too often scars.
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
The only thing I do is I change my keyboard between every book. I usually shop around. I’m very passionate about the physical feel of pressing the keys. It’s got to have the right springiness. I tend to find the built-in keys very unsatisfying, the keys are low-profile and don’t really do anything — I want it to feel like I’m typing.
There’s some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.
It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.
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.
We’re professional worriers. You’re constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them.
You can love someone so much… But you can never love someone as much as you miss them.
Here’s my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I’ve ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.
What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but it does not resurrect.
I don’t think we should see the world of books as fundamentally separate from the world of the Internet. Yes, the Internet contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, but it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books.
I actually try to break my superstitions whenever possible, because it’s irrational. For a long time I believed, when I first started writing, that I couldn’t write well if I wasn’t smoking cigarettes — which is a very dangerous thing to believe, of course! As it turns out, the exact opposite was true. I couldn’t write well if I did smoke cigarettes.
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.
Those awful things are survivable because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.
I just give myself permission to suck. I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts … so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers forever, because there’s a 90 percent chance I’m just gonna delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating. I also like to remind myself of something my dad said in [response] to writers’ block: ‘Coal miners don’t get coal miners’ block.
Here’s to all the places we went. And all the places we’ll go. And here’s me, whispering again and again and again and again: iloveyou.
Writing is something you do alone. It’s a profession for introverts who wanna tell you a story but don’t wanna make eye contact while telling it
If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.
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.
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.
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.
You gave me a forever within the numbered days. For that, I am grateful.
My responsibility is to try to tell true stories. To me a true story is always hopeful, but never simply, uncomplicatedly happy.
That’s the thing about pain… it demands to be felt.
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.
You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.
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.
You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.
I’m so proud of you that it makes me proud of me. I hope you know that.
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.
You can’t not like ‘The Great Gatsby.’ It’s got the best sentences in, like, ever.
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 don’t think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.
With Paper Towns I wanted to write a novel about the challenge of being stuck inside your own consciousness and not being able to live inside anyone else’s mind and how difficult that is.
She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her.
Well, I mean, I’m aware of the fact that I live in 2013 and that the book is set in 2012, you know. But, you know, to be honest with you, I don’t know if this is going to sound unreasonably pretentious, but I expect readers to know what a hamartia is, and I expect them to know what Zeno’s paradox is.
Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I’m writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.
The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.
It hurt because it mattered.
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.
I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you’re trying to be a writer because it’s the only apprenticeship we have, it’s the only way of learning how to write a story.
Love is the most common miracle.
What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.
Just remember that sometimes the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually 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.
At some point, you just pull off the band-aid, and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.
I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending.
“Some people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.
“Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.”
“Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.”
I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.
I just did some calculations and I’ve been able to determine that you’re full of sh*t.
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.
[This] is very important to remember when reading or writing or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.
It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.
I may die young, but at least I’ll die smart.
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.
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.
My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.
This is why we call people exes, I guess – because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. it’s too easy to see an X as a cross-out. it’s not, because there’s no way to cross out something like that. the X is a diagram of two paths.
Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people—even imaginary ones—do not live in vacuums… From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.
That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.
[My] interest as a writer is not in reflecting actual human speech, which, of course, does not occur in sentences and is totally undiagrammable…My interest is in trying to reflect the reality of experience—how we feel when we talk to each other, how we feel when we’re engaging with questions that interest us.
We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are.
That smile could end wars and cure cancer.
One of the pitfalls about writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise-beyond-their-years creatures or these sad-eyed tragic people. And the truth is, people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer. They’re every bit as funny and complex and diverse as anyone else.
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.
I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it’s impossible to tell because I’m underwater. But he wasn’t crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if shed taken the part of him that cried.
You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world… but you do have some say in who hurts you.
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.
Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.
Be First to Comment