John Green > Quotes

“You're going to be okay. I mean, in the long run you'll be dead, and in the short run it's gonna be bumpy, but in the medium run... you're golden.”
― John Green, Hollywood, Ending

“You'll never be alone in this world if you have a library card.”
― John Green, Hollywood, Ending

“...and I keep thinking we are all so young. Our joints are still good. Whatever has begun to harden in us is still soft in that apartment.”
― John Green, Hollywood, Ending

“I do not want to want to be loved by strangers, but I do not want to want most of what I want.”
― John Green, Hollywood, Ending

“He said it like being twenty-one was a debilitating illness you only sometimes survived, which had more or less been my experience.”
― John Green, Hollywood, Ending

“But I have spent my life chasing after irresponsible people who have excuses for being irresponsible, and one does rather tire of the labor. In fact, one begins to feel just the tiniest bit enraged.”
― John Green, Hollywood, Ending

“What it must be like, I wonder, to have that relationship with language, where everything flows, where it's no work to decode letters into sounds, and sounds into concepts. But, of course, it's partly the difference between us that makes it so easy to love her.”
― John Green, Hollywood, Ending

“You're successful, but alone. So what?”
― John Green, Hollywood, Ending

“I was never an actor,' she tells me, 'but there's something akin to that in writing. The feeling of losing oneself, that it isn't even you writing the words but you are instead a kind of aqueduct through which the words flow.”
― John Green, Hollywood, Ending

“I hope our paths cross again,' I said.
'Oh, they will,' Tony said. 'Life is long if you're lucky, and don't neither of us have enough to retire.”
― John Green, Hollywood, Ending

“Some infinities are bigger than others.”
― John Green

“We love others until they can love themselves, until we can love ourselves. And all along the way, the future remains yours, ineluctably and irrevocably. You can cling to that future, as long as you need to, until with work and with time the future becomes present and the present past. You survive, and you survive, until one day, you survived.”
― John Green

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
― John Green

“I couldnt tell if I wanted him because i was so busy wanting him to want me.”
― John Green, Hollywood, Ending

“If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.”
― John Green

“All I can say is that sometime when the world is between day and night, I'm stopped cold by its splendor, and I feel my absurd smallness. You'd think that would be sad, but it isn't. It only makes me grateful. Toni Morrison once wrote, "at some point in your life, the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need a photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough." So what can we say of the cliched beauty of sunsets? Perhaps only that they are enough.”
― John Green

“Everyone kept saying, "I'm sorry for your loss" but I'd lost so much even before she died. I'd lost the certainty that mothers are good, that love is simple, and with her death, I'd lost even the ability to hate her. Grief is a strange bedfellow.”
― John Green

“The miracle of love is that yes, I am here and you are there, but the door is ajar. We get through that door with empathy, with imagining, with acting. We play our way through it with music and dance and art. We break down the door with love. We love others until they can love themselves, until we can love ourselves. And all along the way, the future remains yours, ineluctably and irrevocably. You can cling to that future, as long as you need to, until with work and with time the future becomes present and the present past. You survive, and you survive, until one day, you survived.”
― John Green, Hollywood, Ending

“Observer l’histoire à travers un prisme unique a pour effet de déformer la réalité, car l’histoire est trop complexe pour qu’un seul point de vue suffise à l’épuiser.”
― John Green

“That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste."- Margo Roth Spiegelman”
― John Green

“We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus when Gus told us that he feared oblivion, and I told him that he was fearing something universal and inevitable, and how really, the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering. I thought of my dad telling me that the universe wants to be noticed. But what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us—not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us, as individuals.”
― John Green

“You survive, and you survive, until one day, you survived.”
― John Green, Counseling in HIV Infection and AIDS

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green

“Sometimes, when you read a book, it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal and you become convinced that the shattered world will not be put back together unless each living person reads it.”
― John Green

“We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth's atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it - the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.”
― John Green

“The thing is, sea turtles know exactly how to be sea turtles, whereas I do not know very much about how to be a human.”
― John Green

“I miss the person who hurt me the most, too," Kai said.”
― John Green

“I fell in love the way you fall asleep... slowly, then all at once.”
― John Green

“Leonov’s drawing, simple, straightforward, even childlike, is overwhelmingly the most beautiful and moving depiction of an orbital sunrise I’ve ever seen. Precisely because it is not photo-realistic.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed

“You exchange pieces of yourself for celebrity. Celebrity keeps you working, keeps you paid."

"Except once I've traded those little pieces of myself, I can't get them back. They're not mine anymore.”
― John Green