Quotes by John Green

Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington’s house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it.

He really was beautiful. I know boys arent supposed to be. But he was.

I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.

I dislike the phrase Internet friends, because it implies that people you know online arent really your friends, that somehow the friendship is less real or meaningful to you because it happens through Skype or text messages. The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance.

There is always the risk: something is good and good and good and good, and then all at once it gets awkward. All at once, she sees you looking at her, and then she doesnt want to joke around with you anymore, because she doesnt want to seem flirty, because she doesnt want you to think she likes you. It’s such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle— oh, look, we broke down this wall, I’m going to look at you like a girl and you’re going to look at me like a boy and we’re going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About There What About There. And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself that it’s not the middle but will last forever.

Because youre my friend, wingnut.

When I was little, my dad used to tell me, Will, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you cant pick your friends nose.

Id pick you, I say. Fuck it, I do pick you. I want you to come over to my house in twenty years with your dud and your adopted kids and I want our fucking kids to hang out and I want to, like, drink wine and talk about the Middle East or whatever the fuck were gonna want to do when were old. Weve been friends too long to pick, but if we could pick, Id pick you.

Anybody can look at you. Its quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.

People say friends dont destroy each otherWhat do they know about friends?

There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But were disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare, and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about.

Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not f*ck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

Do the thing youre good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something.

That’s who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.

The longer I do my job the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. Its so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.

I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that Id never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you cant make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldnt see it again, and it occurred to me that 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.

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.