Quotes by John Green

I missed the future.

I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that dont fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you dont want to see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big...mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.

... if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.

Oh, Wikipedia, with your tension between those who would share knowledge and those who would destroy it.

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?

You put the thing that does the killing between your teeth, but you never give it the power to kill you

It´s a metaphor: you see, you put the killing thing right between your teeth,you just dont give it the power to do its killing.

People are supposed to care. Its good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when theyre gone.

I dont really understand the point of crying. Also, I feel that crying is almost - like, aside from deaths of relatives or whatever - totally avoidable if you follow two very simple rules: 1. Dont care too much. 2. Shut up. Everything unfortunate that has ever happened to me has stemmed from failure to follow one of the rules.

Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears.

I’m really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why, or what.

Because personally I think mattering is a piss-poor idea. I just want to fly under the radar, because when you start to make yourself into a big deal, that’s when you get shot down. The bigger a deal you are, the worse your life is.

You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you’re trying to listen to.

I dont think your missing pieces ever go inside you again once they go missing.

The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won’t be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don’t live alife in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either alife or a death that means anything.

I feel like how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. Its so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you dont even know why you need it; you just think you do.

Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? I mean, I’ve always felt like the Katherines dump me right when they start to see what I look like from the inside—well, except K-19. 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?

That doesnt sound like my Margo, she said, and I thought of my Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different funhouse mirrors.

If wed put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyones flowers. I wanted them to be mt flowers.

Big, ugly homes for big, ugly people, I told Margo as we pulled into Casavilla.No shit. If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms, do me a favor and shoot me.