John Green Quotations | Page 3

I’ll give you my strength if I can have your remission.

My parents always liked it when I cursed in front of them. I could see the pleasure of it in their faces. It signified that I trusted them, that I was myself in front of them.

Don't worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway

Do you know why I left America, Lidewij? So that I would never again have to encounter Americans." "But you are an American." "Incurably so, it seems.

No," I said. And maybe it was only because Alaska couldn't hit the brakes and I couldn't hit the accelerator.

And it was just the three of us - three bodies and two people - the three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us too much keeping us from one another.

She's just playing a trick on us. This is just an Alaska Young Prank Extraordinaire. It's Alaska being Alaska, funny and playful and not knowing when or how to put on the brakes.

Breaking up isn't something that gets done to you; its something that happens with you.

Issac:"I dislike living in a world without Augustus Waters." Computer: "I don't understand-" Issac: "Me neither. Pause

I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were...miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around.

I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it.

He puts the killing thing in his mouth but doesn't give it the power to kill him.

The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.

Throughout the book, she refers to herself as "the side effect," which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible.

I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.

The French verb aimer has two meanings. And that’s why he liked her, and loved her. She spoke to him in a language that, no matter how hard you studied it, could not be completely understood.

It always happened like this: he would look and look for the keys to Satan’s Hearse and then finally he’d just give up and say, “Fine. I’ll take the fugging bus,” and on his way out the door, he’d see the keys. Keys show up when you reconcile yourself to the bus; Katherines appear when you start to disbelieve the world contains another Katherine; and, sure enough, the Eureka moment arrived just as he began to accept it would never come.

Colin Singleton’s distance from his glasses made him realize the problem: myopia. He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

All hurt is brain hurt.

The true ninja doesn't make a splash at all.

And I put the latte down on a table, awash in the happy middle of my greatest adventure.

It's almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than it says about either the person I was or the whatever I am now.

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

Dad had a sign of his own. MY BEAUTIFUL FAMILY, it read, and then underneath that (AND GUS).

Mom sobbed something into Dad's chest that I wish I hadn't heard, and that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said, "I won't be a mom anymore." It gutted me pretty badly.

They were angry, I thought. Horrified. These teenagers, with their hormones, making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.

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.

People always get used to beauty though.

I'm not saying it was your fault. I'm saying it wasn't nice.

He responded a few minutes later. Okay. I wrote back. Okay. He responded: Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!

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.

Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness.

The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

Colin emphatically pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading. "Did you like it?" His dad asked. "Yup," Colin said. He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

Without pain, we couldn't know joy.

So I wasn't lying, exactly. I was just choosing among truths.

Patience, grasshopper," I counseled. "You don't want to seem overeager." "Right, that's why I said tomorrow," he said. "I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.

I don't know why boys expect us to like boy movies. We don't expect them to like girl movies.

You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.

the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.

You get all these friends just when you don’t need friends anymore.

When you’re as charming and physically attractive as myself, it’s easy enough to win over people you meet. But getting strangers to love you...now, that’s the trick.

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

Stupid human voices always ruining everything.

it is the nature of stars to cross

I fear your faith has been mis- placed—but then, faith usually is.

but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever.

Television is a passivity.

The missing piece in his stomach hurt so much-and eventually he stopped thinking about the Theorem and wondered only how something that isn't there can hurt you.

There is always the risk: something is good and good and good and good, then all at once it gets awkward.

I stood under the awning for a moment, but finally I decided that being in a bad mood with your friends beats being in a bad mood without them.

Jesus, I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're going to do. I'm just going to do it.

I wouldn't have cared if my girlfriend was a Jaguar-driving Cyclops with a beard - I'd have been grateful just to have someone to make out with.

Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone's about to die.

I have guts, just not when it counts.

I wasn't disappointed. My expectations had been met.

It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations.

I hated being careful, too - or wanted to, at least.

I think if you went back to the eighteenth century and you asked a fifteen year old boy, 'Would you like to marry a woman who has had plastic bags needlessly inserted into her breasts?', that fifteen year old boy would probably be like, 'what's plastic?'.

Collin Singleton could no more stay cool than a blue whale could stay skinny or Bangladesh could stay rich

The world," he said, "is not a wish-granting factory," and then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness.

Can I ask you about Caroline Mathers?" "And you say there's no afterlife.

He'd fought hard, Lida told me, as if there was another way to fight.

Caroline is no longer sufffering from personhood.

You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.

He wanted to draw out the moment before the moment- because as good as kissing feels, nothing feels as good as the anticipation of it.

We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?

But that wasn't quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.

We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. Augustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer. He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim - as you will be - of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible.

It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.

It took me a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints and forty minutes to get over that boy.

The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory.

We're invisible. I've never been here with someone else. It's different being invisible with someone.

You're not boring. You've got to stop saying that, or people will start believing you.

He missed that, too, and it hadn't even happened.

Funerals...are for the living.

And yes, again, that was it exactly. A retyper and not a writer. A prodigy and not a genius.

What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a very playful way of acknowledging that and acknowledging that and that always, whenever we play, whenever we live, we are living in both literal and metaphorical ways on the memory and bones of the dead.

that while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world.

The things I would do to that boy. I mean, not now that I know you're interested in him. But, oh, sweet holy Lord, I would ride that one-legged pony all the way around the corral." "Kaitlyn," I said. "Sorry. Do you think you'd have to be on top?" "Kaitlyn," I said.

I was blind and heart broken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, "I have wonderful news!" And I was like, "I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now," and Gus said, "This is wonderful news you want to hear," and I asked him, "Fine, what is it?" and he said, "You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!

Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always

there is no best and no worst, ...those judgments have no real meaning because there is only what is

Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, “I won’t be a mother anymore.” The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relationship survives. (It changes, but it survives.)

He called out to his fellow monks,'Come quickly I am tasting stars.

Augustus, perhaps you’d like to share your fears with the group.” “My fears?” “Yes.” “I fear oblivion,” he said without a moment’s pause. “I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.” “Too soon,” Isaac said, cracking a smile. “Was that insensitive?” Augustus asked. “I can be pretty blind to other people’s feelings.

Long week. Long month. Long life.

Caroline was always moody and miserable, but I liked it. I liked feeling as if she had chosen me as the only person in the world not to hate, and so we spent all this time together just ragging on everyone, you know?

You used," he said, and then took a sharp breath, "to call me Augustus.

The prospect of a world that contains neither humans nor Z's is not so terrifying. Nature will take its world back. Animals will frolic and fight. There will be no lord of the manor, which is not such a bad thing, because it seems to me that people have done a pretty poor job of guiding the biosphere for the last few thousand years.

In those fifty, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I'd never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.

I inherited that penchant for intellectualism, a character flaw that these days can only be thoroughly eradicated by getting Z’ed up.

History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that they’re processes – that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today; just as today, we are making subtle, irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember as revolutions.

You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet.

I think forever is an incorrect concept.

We have bottled all the stars this evening, my young friend.

I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

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.

So you've been gone a couple days,' Alison said. 'Hmm, what'd you miss...A celebrity did drugs. Politicians disagreed. A different celebrity wore a bikini that revealed a bodily imperfection. A team won a sporting event, but another team lost.

Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.