Quotes by John Green

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you cant pick your friends nose.

you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you cant pick your friends nose.

Kafir, you have a very complicated problem with a very simple solution.

Most of my friends were in band, and most of my free time during school was spent within twenty feet of the band room

Books—they werent ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

He really was beautiful. I know boys aren’t supposed to be, but he was.

I realize that they giggle and I actually laugh, that they show their cleavage and I have none to show, but just so you know, I am also a girl. Im one of the three wise MEN. And its gay to think that James Bond is hot.

Youll... youll... live your best life today.

Sometimes I dream that Im writing a memoir. A memoir would just be the thing to keep me in the hearts and memories of my adoring public.

Why do writers use symbolism?” Okay, so let’s say you have a headache and you wanna tell someone about it and you say, “I have a headache!” and other people are like, “Yeah, whatever. Everybody gets headaches.” But your headache is not a regular headache, it’s a serious headache, so you say, “My brain is on fire!” to try to help these people understand that this is a headache that needs attention! That’s a metaphor, right? And you use it so that you can be understood. Now let’s say you want to take those same imagistic principles but apply them to a much more complex idea than having a headache, like, for instance, the yearning that one feels for one’s dreams. And you can see the dream but you can’t cross the bay to get to the green light that embodies your dream. And you want to talk about how socio-economic class in America is a barrier – a bay-like barrier, some would say – that stands between you and the green light and makes that gap unbridgeable. Now, you can just talk about that stuff directly, but when you talk about it symbolically, it becomes more powerful, because instead of being abstract it becomes kind of observable…. So I think that’s why.

That brief walk was one of those moments he knew hed remember and look back on, one of those moments that hed try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.[p214]

I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didnt think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.

I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?

Maybe Harry Potter is real and youre not.

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will… but then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all. Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside someone else… But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills the fascists

Dont worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway

but there was nothing I could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intra cranial firecrackers

Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it. And I had thought the thought.

My thoughts are stars I cant fanthom into constellations.

My thoughts are stars i cannot fathom into constellations