Quotes by John Green

“We all romanticize the people we adore.”

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

“You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.”

“Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”

“I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”

“But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaskas 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 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”

“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.”

“Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.”

“The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.”

“The thing about dead people... The thing is you sound like a bastard if you dont romanticize them, but the truth is... complicated, I guess.”

“Im sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.”

“I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.”

“It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.”

“My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really - which meant I guess that he was still living, too.”

“When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself.”

“I was blind and heart broken and didnt want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, I have wonderful news! And I was like, I dont really want to hear wonderful news right now, and Gus said, This is wonderful news you want to hear, and I asked him, Fine, what is it? and he said, You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!”