John Green

The voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

— John Green

Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

— John Green

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

— John Green

I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.

— John Green

When things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It's because a little piece gets lost - the two remaining ends couldn't fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.

— John Green

I didn't tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You're a woman. Now die.

— John Green

It's not how you die. It's who you die.

— John Green

The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.

— John Green

When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself.

— John Green

My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really - which meant I guess that he was still living, too.

— John Green

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will

— John Green

I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.

— John Green

So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay.

— John Green

Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should've gotten more."

— John Green

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed

— John Green

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.

— John Green

Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning,' and Isben looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he died.

— John Green

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

— John Green

The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes

— John Green

You'll Never Walk Alone' is cheesy but not wrong. The song doesn't claim that the world is just a happy place. It just asks us to walk on with hopes in our hearts. And like Louis in the Carousel, even if you don't really believe in the golden sky or the sweet silver song of the lark when you start singing, you believe it a little more when you finish.

— John Green

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.)

— John Green

The thing about dead people... The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them, but the truth is... complicated, I guess.

— John Green

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

— John Green

Imagine others complexly.

— John Green

Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.

— John Green

Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you," and the Colonel whispered, "I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did," and I said, "No. Not past tense." She wasn't even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense.

— John Green

What a slut time is. She screws everybody...

— John Green

Reading someone's poetry is like seeing them naked" -Davis Pritchett

— John Green

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.

— John Green

I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.

— John Green

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.

— John Green

All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.

— John Green

Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.

— John Green

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.

— John Green

I was born into Bolívar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps.

— John Green

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

— John Green

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.

— John Green

Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher's last words were "Now comes the mystery." The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that's a record," before dying. Alaska's favorite was playwright Eugene O'Neill: "Born in a hotel room, and--God damn it--died in a hotel room." Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, "Oh God. What's happened?" Movie star James Dean said, "They've got to see us," just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.

— John Green

And then I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out my cannula so I could smell better, breathing him and out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest burning until I couldn't distinguish among the pains.

— John Green

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.

— John Green

Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.

— John Green

I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going.

— John Green

I don't care if the New York Times writes an obituary for me. I just want you to write one. ... You say you're not special because the world doesn't know about you, but that's an insult to me. I know about you.

— John Green

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.

— John Green

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.

— John Green

I spent the next three hours in classrooms, trying not to look at the clocks over various blackboards, and then looking at the clocks, and then being amazed that only a few minutes had passed since I last looked at the clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight for the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.

— John Green

You can't just make me different and then leave

— John Green

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it 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.

— John Green

I just think if you don't

— John Green

Sometimes people don’t understand

— John Green

I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.

— John Green

The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won't be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything.

— John Green

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?

— John Green

Photographs are just light and time,

— John Green

What the hell is

— John Green

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

— John Green

Maybe 'Okay' will be our 'always'...

— John Green

These are all direct quotes, except every time they use a curse word, I'm going to use the name of a famous American poet:

— John Green

Here's the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That's what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.

— John Green

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. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I can't remember, because I never knew.

— John Green

What a slut time is. She screws with everybody.

— John Green

So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay.

— John Green

I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.

— John Green

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

— John Green

Colder by the hour, more dead with every breath.

— John Green

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

— John Green

She cannot possibly be dead, people do not just die

— John Green

The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank's name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. FOUR. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around.

— John Green

Ergo: girls should always make the first move, because (a) they are, on the whole, less likely to be rejected than guys, (b) that way, girls will never get kissed unless they want to be kissed.

— John Green