Top 1379 Quotes & Sayings by John Green - Page 23

Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.

But why Alaska?' I asked her. 'Well, later, I found out what it means. It's from an Aleut word, Alyeska. It means 'that which the sea breaks against,' and I love that. But at the time, I just saw Alaska up there. And it was big, just like I wanted to be.

I'd rather wonder than get answers I couldn't live with.

When I was in college, I remember fearing that the dreary grind of adulthood would feature infinitely more existential dread than frat parties had, but the opposite has been true for me. I'm much less likely to feel that gnawing fear of aimlessness and nihilism than I used to be and that's partly because education gave me job opportunities, but it's mostly because education gave me perspective and context.

It has been my experience that maximizing income is a helluva lot less important than maximizing passion and fulfillment in your both professionally and personally.

I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (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.)

I'm not interested in writing for adults. I like them as people! I don't like the way they publish books in that world. Nothing ever gets a chance.

But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER.

I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person yet.

When people have to choose between civilization and warm genitals, they choose warm genitals

There will come a time, when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything.

. . . Endlessness is a really strange idea in a universe that is defined by its endings.

Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox.

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth.

I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.

Nerd girls are the world's greatest under-utilized romantic resource.

The darkest nights produce the brightest stars.

The truth hurts because it's real. It hurts because it mattered. And that's an important thing to acknowledge to yourself.

There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.

You live for pretentious metaphors.

The United States Congress, like a lot of rich people, lives in two houses.

I love you' really is the gateway drug of breaking up.

Patients are almost always preceded by their parents, because no matter how fast an ambulance can drive, terrified parents can drive faster.

I think that most of us [writers] would rather have an audience than countless riches. If we wanted to be rich, we'd be doing smething else.

I was surprised. I'd always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasn't dumb.

He loved the scratching of pencil against paper when he was focused: it meant something was happening.

That's the great thing about being in the third grade. If you've got one polysyllabic adjective, everyone thinks you're a genius.

In English, we don't have a word for people who aren't virgins. What the non-virgin lexical gap really made me think was that our obsession with sexual purity is such that once you are no longer this THING, you are indescribable.

Sexuality is important, but it's certainly not the most interesting or important thing happening to you right now. We live in a world that tells us that there are only two important things. One is the acquisition of goods and the other is either the acquisition or avoidance of sex, but it turns out that the question of who's a virgin and who's a virgout is not the most interesting question.

I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?

Sunlight feels warm and rough against your skin like a kiss on the cheek from your dad.

In general, watching children's television is a dark and surreal descent into madness where the characters on the screen talk directly to you.

Study broadly and without fear.

Ya gotta live somewhere, but also you GET to live somewhere.

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.

When we think of death, we often imagine it as happening in degrees: We think of a sick person becoming less and less alive until finally they are gone.

Teenagers are extremely funny, and extremely clever and intellectually curious. But they're also willing to ask questions about the meaning of life without disguising them around irony, and ask questions about what are our responsibilities to other people without having to couch it in irony.

I think teenagers bring a lot of intellectual sophistication. They're wrestling with big questions. It's just that, a lot of times they do that separately from adults.

Destiny is not something that happens all at once-it's something that happens only in retrospect.

High School made me realize that the people who say they will never change, are always the ones who change the most.

The consequences of being un-cool feel so big that a lot of times you end of not finding ways to have open and honest conversations.

All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.

I think all true stories are hopeful stories. I don't think there's any room for nihilism.

One of the jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our everyday lives.

I don't think ministering requires a religious context. The number one thing is that every parent is extremely worried about their kid. Of course, when a chaplain shows up, that can exacerbate this worry rather than calm it.

I think when you're 16, if you have good parents, they generally just fade in the background. I had great parents, and because they were great, I thought very little about them in high school.

The challenge is the same whether or not I'm collaborating: to empathize with your reader and to tell a story that will matter to him or her. But the mechanics of going about that challenge change when you're collaborating, because you have someone to help refine your thinking and expand your vision of what might happen.

The miracle and hope of human consciousness is that we can still conceive of boundlessness.

All the characters are made out of words. With reading, I understand that the people aren't real but the fact that they are made out of language and are made out of words is extremely powerful to me. It becomes transformative for me. Different people have different ways of trying to make stories using language.

It's bad for your brain not to unplug.

The universe is biased toward consciousness because the universe wants to be noticed. It's a way into existential hope that doesn't have too much cliché wrapped around it.

There's not a lot of room for un-ironic emotion in contemporary culture. I think that irony is an important tool in dealing with the world as we find it. It's a tool of protection, but it can also be a tool of incision to get to some truth. But along the way maybe we've lost some of what I think of as the power of straightforward emotion and earnestness and seriousness.

I don't see a future where we're all taught by robots. The real life, physical experience of being in a classroom and having conversations with knowledgeable people is immeasurably valuable and irreplaceable.

As a reader, I don't feel a story has an obligation to make me happy. I want stories to show me a bigger world than the one I know.

If we restructure things to see that the hero's journey is a degree in astrophysics rather than a journey to star in a reality show, that's a better world.

Don't lie to anyone, but particularly don't lie to millennials. They just know. They can smell it. Be yourself: if you're old, be old. If you don't know anything about pop culture, don't pretend to know anything about pop culture. When you credit teenagers with intelligence and emotional sophistication, they respond intelligently and with emotional sophistication.

I think that it's a universal urge to have our pain not be felt alone and to have our joys not be felt alone.

I think people who are religious are more likely to want one around, but it's a very secular position.

Becoming a father made me much more interested in the parent character in my novels. I've never found parents that interesting.