A Quote by John Green

For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way. — © John Green
For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.
I couldn’t help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them—it was a kind of sad I didn’t mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.
Holding this soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though, and seeing how it slept with complete trust in me, I felt a warm rush in my chest. I put my hand on the cat's chest and felt his heart beating. The pulse was faint and fast, but his heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted to his small body with all the restless earnestness of my own.
You ever feel like you know someone so much that they can breathe for you? Like when their chest and your chest rise and fall, they do it together because they have to? That's how it felt. That's how it always felt.
I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only think I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.
Grace is God as heart surgeon, cracking open your chest, removing your heart - poisoned as it is with pride and pain - and replacing it with his own.
And Supernatural, in fact, going there wasit felt like a place where I had to actually, um, learn to be kind of manly. I felt like I had to kind of change my, like, way of speaking for a little bit, just to kind of fit in, oddly enough. Which was weird.
I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.
Being such a tomboy growing up, that was one thing that changed me as a person, as well. It broadened me, like me cracking myself open in a certain way.
I often felt like I was walking around with this Scarlet Letter stitched to my chest from the way that people treated me.
In training, I felt like my body would switch one way, but my leg would kind of stay in one direction. So I kind of felt like it wasn't stable.
I feel like Barack Obama, kind of in a political sense, embodies that same kind of spirit as a Q-Tip or a Santogold or a Common. I feel like there is a synergy going on here in this country and abroad. I feel like the doors are open, and it's time to push them wide open.
For the longest time, I just felt like I had to be really, really harsh to be taken seriously as a CEO.
I would climb on roofs and jump off using my parents' bed sheet, hoping it would open like a parachute. I was always getting hurt, breaking a leg, you know, bruising, cracking my head open.
What I remove from my writing is linear context. It's not really important to me, because it doesn't give me chills to see, "you flip the latch and the lock opens and then you can open the top of the chest and inside the chest is this." That doesn't give me chills, to think in that vein. So I've always kind of avoided it.
I just always felt whole when I was writing. I felt this kind of beautiful privacy that I never felt in any other way. I feel like there's this great fullness to being alone, and writing is a really vivid way and a really magical way of being alone.
I wrote them kind of consecutively, starting with 'Holy,' and then '1950,' 'Talia,' 'Upper West Side,' 'Make My Bed,' and I was kind of like, 'This is it.' It felt right. It felt complete. It felt like a sentence. I really enjoyed making it.
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