Quotes by John Green

The marks we leave are too often scars.

I just want to domething that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.

For me, at least, fiction is the only way i can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...its ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)Id never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote (NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,

...there are books...which you cant tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

The prank is entitled Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm.

I have a date, he explained. This is an emergency. He paused to catch his breath. Do you know - breath - how to iron? I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled like an old woman whod spent her youth sunbathing. If only the Colonel didnt ball up his every belonging and stuff it into random dresser drawers. I think you just turn it on and press it against the shirt, right? I said. I dont know. I didnt even know we had an iron. We dont. Its Takumis. But Takumi doesnt know how to iron, either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, Youre not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me. Oh God, I need to smoke. I need to smoke, but I cant reek when I see Saras parents. Okay, screw it. Were going to smoke in the bathroom with the shower on. The shower has steam. Steam gets rid of wrinkles, right?

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.

There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.

We are taught that the hero’s journey is the journey from weakness to strength. But I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness.

With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? - A.Y.Im going to leave that up for the rest of the semester, he said.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 dont want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, were trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called peoples rotten lots in life.

I figured something out, he said aloud. The future is unpredictable.Hassan said, Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice.

The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

Jesus, Im not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what theyre going to do. Im just going to do it.

But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future, and so they spent more time thinking about it. About the future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future...

Im not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what theyre gonna do. Im just going to do it. Imagining the future is kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how youll 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.

Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement. There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for planning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future, and so they spent more time thinking about it. About the future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future - you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.

.. the smell of canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their rs and gs in a way Id never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before this recurrance 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 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. That is probably true even if you live to be ninety.

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how youll 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.