Quotes by John Green

You cant know what an experience will mean to future-you until you are future-you. You need millions of seconds of perspective, which ultimately, only time can buy.

He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

There will come a time, I said, 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. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this - I gestured encompassingly - will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows thats what everyone else does.

In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of the century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything--theres no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.

Imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

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. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.

Its hard to believe in coincidence, but its even harder to believe in anything else.

I was surprised. Id always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasnt dumb.

The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.

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

Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius, The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Human existence is temporary and all the knowledge of the universe we acquire will in time be forgotten because there will be no humans left to benefit from any of the stuff we learned.And yet, this doesnt invalidate scientific exploration to me. We seek to understand the universe because it makes our lives better and more rich. Similarly, we tell stories (and think about why and how to tell stories) because it makes human existence richer. Made-up stories matter. They bring us pleasure and solace and nurture empathy by letting us see the world through others eyes. They also help us to feel unalone, to understand that our grief and joy is shared not just by those around us but by all those who came before us and all those still yet to come.

Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories.

still, what could i say? that i didnt just feel depressed - instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones? that if he got blue, i got black? that i hated those pills so much, because i knew how much i relied on them to live?

weltschmerz. its the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be

i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time.

i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time

i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time.

She said she couldnt handle it,’ he told me. ‘I’m about to lose my eyesight and she can’t handle it.’I was thinking about the word handle, and all the unholdable things that get handled. . . .Well, to be fair, I said, I mean, she probably cant handle it. Neither can you, but she doesnt have to handle it. And you do.I kept saying “always” to her today, “always always always”, and she just kept talking over me and not saying it back. It was like I was already gone, you know? “Always” was a promise! How can you just break a promise?Sometimes people dont understand the promises theyre making when they make them, I said.Isaac shot me a look. ‘Right, of course. But you keep them anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promises anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?’I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.

But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. - Hazel Grace Lancaster