Quotes by John Green

We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.

We need never be without hope because we can never be irreparably broken.

I believe in hope, in what is something called ”radical hope.” I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r

I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, I want to go too! I want to go too! And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: We are all going.

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

I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but cant due to deadness.

I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories-it will die with us,as it should.

Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, “I won’t be a mother anymore.” The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relationship survives. (It changes, but it survives.)

You cant just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and Im sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I dont even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I cant remember, because I never knew.

I didnt tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! Youre a woman. Now die.

It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations.

Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beechers last words were Now comes the mystery. The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, Ive had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe thats a record, before dying. Alaskas favorite was playwright Eugene ONeill: Born in a hotel room, and--God damn it--died in a hotel room. Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, Oh God. Whats happened? Movie star James Dean said, Theyve got to see us, just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.

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.

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

Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I dont want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, were trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called peoples rotten lots in life.

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.

I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Guss parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

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

Right, well, hed been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, You seem to be feeling better this morning, and Isben looked at her and said, On the contrary, and then he died.

And then I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out my cannula so I could smell better, breathing him and out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest burning until I couldnt distinguish among the pains.