Quotes from John Green

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.

Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.

We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll 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.

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape 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.

The venn diagram of boys who don't like smart girls and boys you don't wanna date is a circle.

I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.

And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn't planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together.

It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.

My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.

I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.

Where is my chance to be somebody's Peter Van Houten?' He hit the steering wheel weakly, the car honking as he cried. He leaned his head back, looking up. 'I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me fucking die.

Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it.

Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.

Real gangster-ass Nerdfighters don't run from nothing… 'cause real gangster-ass Nerdfighters can't run fast.

Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.

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

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose.

We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either.