Quotes by John Green

But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?-Aza

Love is always a miracle, everywhere, every time.

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never get struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.

No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you cant go all the way around.

My heart is really pounding, I said. Thats how you know youre having fun.

I am in love with you, and I am not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.

Photographs are just light and time - Aza Holmes

In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business—and I wanted to try to reflect that.

And yet still I worried. I like being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

I felt the worry start to snatch at my breath when I finished talking.

Because you simply cannot draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.

The thing is that it could never again feel natural to talk to her

we need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken

That didnt happen, of course. Things never happenedlike I imagined them.

There is always the risk: something is 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 seem flirty, because she doesnt want you to think she likes you. Its such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away all 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, Im going to look at you like a girl and youre going to look like me like a boy and were 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 its not the middle but will last forever.

The book was turned to the page with Anne Franks name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. FOUR. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around.

I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness...I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still that think that, sometimes, maybe the afterlife is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter...I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take her genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else there entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed...energy is never created and never destroyed. We cannot be born and cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations... Thomas Edisons last words were: Its very beautiful over there. I dont know where there is, but I believe its somewhere, and I hope its beautiful.

If the inevitably of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows thats what everyone else does.

You and I are just kids. Weve got the best and the worst of it in front of us

Maybe life is not about accomplishing some bullshit markers.