John Green Quotations

You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.

My responsibility is to try to tell true stories. To me a true story is always hopeful, but never simply, uncomplicatedly happy.

'Will Grayson, Will Grayson' is about two guys named Will Grayson who live in different Chicago suburbs who eventually meet each other.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

You can't not like 'The Great Gatsby.' It's got the best sentences in, like, ever.

Videogame players essentially choose whether to win the game or to die heroically. There's a certain glory in both.

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.

One of the pitfalls of writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise, beyond-their-years creatures or else these sad-eyed, tragic people. And the truth is people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer.

Read a lot. Read broadly... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored... Write a lot.

Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 don't decide where I live. My wife decides. She's a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.

We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle.

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.

It's hard to get movie studios to pay a lot of money for movies that don't have robots or explosions.

Whenever you use historic models, the housing market is going to be underestimated, and I think this is what has happened here.

She took it in, and I could tell it really registered with her. But she held her personal emotions to get the broadcast on the air.

I was enrolled in divinity school and thought I was going to become a minister - I'm Episcopalian - but I was disavowed of that notion pretty quickly while working at the hospital. I found myself really unfulfilled by the answers that are traditionally offered to questions of why some people suffer and why others suffer so little.

I think the economy has a good chance of beginning to slow rapidly next fall. We're sort of teetering on the edge of a serious slowdown.

It does have a kind of byzantine quality to it. There is a good bit of strange stuff going on.

I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.

Those big things are hard to do under the best of circumstances. Surely there are smaller things he can do, such as with the tax code.

We had a party, a Father's Day party, going-away party and daughter's birthday party all wrapped up in one, ... He was great; the thing of it is he loves kids.

I ran like a cheetah - well, like a cheetah that smoked too much.

The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.

I'm in love with cities I've never been to and people I've never met.

Sawyer lost despite being the stronger candidate in terms of experience.

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.

There's higher voter turnout among Hispanic evangelicals than among Hispanics in general.

The car caught fire. From what I understand it just went up the side of the house.

All else being equal, past officeholders ought to have an advantage, but all things are rarely equal.

That's why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates a adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointments in the Department of Having a Voice that Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin.

I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.

No, I don’t think you’re gonna be single forever, and also I don’t understand your obsession with romantic love. There are other ways to have fulfilling relationships that can sustain you and make your life great and fun other than having a sexualized relationship. It’s not the only kind of fulfilling human interaction. So, even if you are single forever, that doesn’t mean that you’ve had some kind of failed life.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, there was no longer anyone to remember with.

I hadn’t read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.

It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing unattainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness wh's kind of bossy--then I had to basically start liking a while different person.

Augustus Waters," I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank House, and then thinking that Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Anne Frank House, and that she would probably like nothing more than for her home to have become a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love.

It's total bullshit," he said. "The whole thing. Eighty percent survival rate and he's in the twenty percent? Bullshit. He was such a bright kid. It's bullshit. I hate it. But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think forever is an incorrect concept.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

Long week. Long month. Long life.

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.

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

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.)

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

Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always

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!

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.

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

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.

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

Funerals...are for the living.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Caroline is no longer sufffering from personhood.

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

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

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.

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

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?'.

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

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

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

I have guts, just not when it counts.

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

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.

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.