Quotes by John Green

Do you know what your problem is? You cant live with the idea that someone might leave.

I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life..

Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? But I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself—if they could live in my memories—would anyone, anyone, love me?

I dont know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.

I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose.

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

I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it.

I must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?

I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies.

Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future.

What about the rest of your life?She shrugged. What about it?Arent you worried about, like, forever?Forever is composed of nows, she says.

It is worth it to leave behing my minor life for grander maybes-Miles Pudge

Imagining the future is a 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.

It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.

The real heroes anyway arent the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going.

I was born into Bolívars labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais Great Perhaps.

Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But theres a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabea al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seem running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God.

Saying I notice youre a nerd is like saying, Hey, I notice that youd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that youd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that? In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even lame is kind of lame. Saying Youre lame is like saying You walk with a limp. Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and hes done all right for himself.