John Michael Green
John Green is an American author, YouTube content creator, and podcaster. He won the 2006 Printz Award for his debut novel, Looking for Alaska, and has had several of his subsequent books debut at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list, including his most popular novel, The Fault in Our Stars. (John Green Quotes)
“A woman so strong she burns heaven and drenches hell.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“After all this time, it seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out- but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“All of life is dependent upon other life, and the closer we consider what constitutes living, the harder life becomes to define.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“And I wanted to tell him that even though I’d never been in love, I knew what it was like to be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated by it, the way my grandmother talked about God being everywhere.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I’ve been smart longer.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“And so we all matter – maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“Any sentence that combined “I love you” and “but” could not be good.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“As lives go, I’ll take the quietly desperate over the radically bipolar.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“As long as we don’t die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“As much as life can suck, it always beats the alternative.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“Because memories fall apart, too. And you’re left with nothing.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“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.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“Being in a relationship, that’s something you choose. Being friends, that’s something you just are.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“But knowing something abstractly is different than knowing it experientially.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“Caring doesn’t sometimes lead to misery. It always does.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“Christmas is a state of mind.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“Christmas is never over, unless you want it to be… Christmas is a state of mind.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“Despair isn’t very productive. That’s the problem with it. Like a replicating virus, all despair can make is more of itself.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“Even the most extraordinary genius can accomplish very little alone.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“Every loss is unprecedented. You can’t ever know someone else’s hurt, not really—just like touching someone else’s body isn’t the same as having someone else’s body.” (John Green Quotes)
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“For humans, there is ultimately no way out of the obligations and limitations of nature. We are nature. And so, like history, the climate is both something that happens to us and something we make.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“For many species of large animals in the twenty-first century, the single most important determinant of survival is whether their existence is useful to humans. But if you can’t be of utility to people, the second best thing you can be is cute. You need an expressive face, ideally some large eyes. Your babies need to remind us of our babies. Something about you must make us feel guilty for eliminating you from the planet.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“He wanted to draw out the moment before the moment- because as good as kissing feels, nothing feels as good as the anticipation of it.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“History presses into us, shaping contemporary experience. History changes as we look back on the past from different presents. And history is electric current, too—charged and flowing. It takes power from some sources and delivers it to others.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“Holidays bring out neediness like nothing else.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“How do you just stop being terrified of getting left behind and ending up by yourself forever and not meaning anything to the world?”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“Humans are not the protagonists of this planet’s story. If there is a main character, it is life itself, which makes of earth and starlight something more than earth and starlight. But in the age of the Anthropocene, humans tend to believe, despite all available evidence, that the world is here for our benefit.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“I am glad to be unalone in cramped circles of restless yearning.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“I can almost imagine a happiness without her, the ability to let her go, to feel our roots are connected even if I never see that leaf of grass again.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“I couldn’t make myself happy, but I could make people around me miserable.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“I don’t know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“I don’t think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“I don’t think you’re missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“I feel like I am a human being planting carrot seeds into Earth, but really, as my brother would tell me, I am Earth planting Earth into Earth.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“I feel like my life is so scattered right now. Like it’s all the small pieces of paper and someone’s turned on the fan. But, talking to you makes me feel like the fan’s been turned off for a little bit. Like things could actually make sense. You completely unscatter me, and I appreciate that so much.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“I felt certain something was going to kill me, and of course I was right: Something is going to kill you, someday, and you can’t know if this is the day.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can’t due to deadness.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“I find hopelessness to be a kind of pain. One of the worst kinds. For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn’t hate people who watched or played them.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“I have some way-down vibrating part of my subconscious that needs to self-destruct, at least a little bit.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“I have to tell you man, that my stalker meter is kind of registering in the red zone right now.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“I just did some calculations and I’ve been able to determine that you’re full of shit.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“I may have been a complete lunatic, but I was a complete lunatic with manners.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“I realize Jubilee is a bit of a stripper name. You probably think I have heard the call of the pole.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“I responded to this development with the kind of sophisticated language for which I am famous. “Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid crap.” (John Green Quotes)
John Green
Let it Snow
“I still can’t find language to describe how breathtakingly beautiful sunsets are—not breathtakingly, actually, but breath-givingly beautiful. All I can say is that sometimes when the world is between day and night, I’m stopped cold by its splendor, and I feel my absurd smallness.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“I stood under the awning for a moment, but finally I decided that being in a bad mood with your friends beats being in a bad mood without them.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“I suppose I missed writing, but in a way you miss someone you used to love.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“I think a lot of the pleasure in sports is found in performing well.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and 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.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“I’d rather wonder than get the answers I couldn’t live with.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“If I die weep at my grave every day until a seedling appears in the dirt, then cry on it to make it grow until it becomes a beautiful tree whose roots surround my body.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“I’ll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them–and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“I’m really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“I’m starting to realize that people lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, & so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“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.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“In just 250,000 years, our behavior has led to the extinction of many species, and driven many more into steep decline. This is lamentable, and it is also increasingly needless. We probably didn’t know what we were doing thousands of years ago as we hunted some large mammals to extinction. But we know what we’re doing now. We know how to tread more lightly upon the earth. We could choose to use less energy, eat less meat, clear fewer forests. And we choose not to. As a result, for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“In the Anthropocene there are no disinterested observers; there are only participants”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“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.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“It is May of 2020, and I do not have a brain well suited for this.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“It occurs to me that technology often brags about solving problems it created.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“It’s no coincidence that the scientific revolution in Britain coincided with the rise of British participation in the Atlantic slave trade and the growing wealth being extracted from colonies and enslaved labor.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“It’s no wonder we worry about the end of the world. Worlds end all the time.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“It’s not what the universe gives us that matters, but what we give the universe”
John Green
Let it Snow
“It’s always awkward when someone doesn’t realize you’re joking and devotes thought time to what you’ve said. Double that when the person is wearing tinfoil.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“It’s hard to believe in coincidence, but it’s even harder to believe in anything else.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“It’s just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“It’s not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That’s the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“It’s turtles all the way fucking down, Holmesy. You’re trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that’s not how it works.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can’t do that until your life has grown roots.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“Life is never simple paths- only dizzying labyrinths folding in on themselves”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“Maybe all the strings inside him broke.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“Maybe there’s something you’re afraid to say, or someone you’re afraid to love, or somewhere you’re afraid to go. It’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt because it matters.” (John Green Quotes)
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“Memory is not so much a camera as a filter. The particulates it holds on to are nothing compared to what leaks through.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“My whole life I thought I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“Never predict the end of the world. You’re almost certain to be wrong, and if you’re right, no one will be around to congratulate you.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“No one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“Nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“One person’s crazy is another person’s sane, I guess.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“Our hearts were broken in the same places. That’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“Our obsessive desire to make and have and do and say and go and get—six of the seven most common verbs in English—may ultimately steal away our ability to be, the most common verb in English.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“People always talk like there’s a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn’t, at least not for me. I remember what I’ve imagined and imagine what I remember.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“Proximity doesn’t breed familiarity.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“Scared isn’t a good excuse. Scared is the excuse everyone has always used.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“Scientists estimate that phages cause a trillion trillion infections per second, destroying half the world’s bacteria every forty-eight hours.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“She is close enough to me that I can see her, because even now there is the outward sign of visible light, even at night in this parking lot on the outskirts of Algoe. After we kiss, our foreheads touch as we stare at each other. Yes, I can see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“She loved mysteries so much, that she became one.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“Shouldn’t letting go be painless if you’ve never learned how to hold on?”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“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 a hurricane.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“So keeping the box closed just keeps you in the dark, not the universe.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“Some people have lives; some people have music.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“Something about me has always liked the drama and inconvience of bad weather. The worse the better, really.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“Sometimes I wondered why she liked me, or at least tolerated me. Why any of them did. Even I found myself annoying.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“Sometimes when we forget to do things for others, it’s because we’re too wrapped up in our own problems.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“Sometimes you happen to run across a brilliant run of radio songs, where each tie one station goes to commercial, you scan to another that has just started to play a song you love but had almost forgotten about, a song you never would’ve picked but turns out to be perfect for shouting along to.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“That’s what the voices in your head are for, to get you through the silent parts.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“That’s who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“The challenge and responsibility of personhood, it seems to me, is to recognize personhood in others—to listen to others’ pain and take it seriously, even when you yourself cannot feel it.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“The madness of wealth. Sometimes you think you’re spending the money, but all along the money’s spending you. But only if you worship it. You serve whatever you worship.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“The mighty pulse of the throbbing today does make new things out of old—but it also makes old things out of new.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“The missing piece in his stomach hurt so much-and eventually he stopped thinking about the Theorem and wondered only how something that isn’t there can hurt you.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended only by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“The only way out is through.” And the only good way through is together.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“The pleasure isn’t in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“The problem with happy endings is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“The town was paper, but the memories were not.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“There are times in your life when you do things precisely as you have practice and prepared for them. And then there are times when you listen to Jamie Carragher.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“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.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“There is no holding history fast. It is always receding and dissolving, not just into the unknowable past but also into the unfixable future.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“There is nothing about a bad situation that fourteen hyper cheerleaders can’t worsen.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“There is some comfort for me in knowing that life will go on even when we don’t. But I would argue that when our light goes out, it will be Earth’s greatest tragedy, because while I know humans are prone to grandiosity, I also think we are by far the most interesting thing that ever happened on Earth.” (John Green Quotes)
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“There was so much news. News that was forever breaking, that there was never time for context.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“There’s a certain way I talk about the things I don’t talk about. Maybe that’s true for all of us. We have ways of closing off the conversation so that we don’t ever get directly asked what we can’t bear to answer.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“There’s some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“These houses had been plunked down with an alarming randomness — unevenly spaced, on crooked lines, like whoever had designed the place had said, “We’ll just follow this cat, and wherever he sits down, we’ll build something.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“They love their hair because they’re not smart enough to love something more interesting.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“Things never happened like I imagined them.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“Thomas Edison’s last words were “It’s very beautiful over there”. I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“Those of us who frequent the band room have long suspected that Becca maintains her lovely figure by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished children.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“To accept the demonization of the marginalized as inevitable is to give up on the whole human enterprise.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“Tonight, darling, we are going to right a lot of wrongs. And we are going to wrong some rights. The first shall be last; the last shall be first; the meek shall do some earth-inheriting. But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“Tradition is a way of being with people, not just the people you’re observing the traditions with now, but also all those who’ve ever observed them.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“Two of the Anthropocene’s major institutions are the nation-state and the limited liability corporation, both of which are real and powerful—and on some level made-up.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“We acknowledge that being the person God made you cannot separate you from God’s love.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“We are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them. We are so powerful that we have escaped our planet’s atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“We are greater than the sum of our parts.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“We are so powerful that we have escaped our planet’s atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“We can talk and talk and talk about what the pain is like, but we can never manage to convey what it is.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“We didn’t talk much. But we didn’t need to.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“We imagine people as animals or gods. -But she was just a person, a girl.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“We just did an awesome job of not dying.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“We never really talked much or even looked at each other, but it didn’t matter because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe even more intimate than eye contact anyway. I mean, anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“We should get out of the habit of saying that anything is once-in-a-lifetime. We should stop pretending we have any idea how long a lifetime is, or what might happen in one.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“What an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“What’s most interesting to me about humanity is not what our individual members do, but the kinds of systems we build and maintain together. The light bulb is cool and everything, but what’s really cool is the electrical grid used to power it.” (John Green Quotes)
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“When I was a kid, I thought being a parent meant knowing what to say and how to say it. But I have no idea what to say or how to say it. All I can do is shut up and listen. Otherwise, you miss all the good stuff.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“When things break, it’s not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It’s because a little piece gets lost – the two remaining ends couldn’t fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you’re just kidding.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“When you stop wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you stop suffering when they do.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“You can’t see the future coming—not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”
John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“You don’t know a father’s weight until it’s lifted.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.”
John Green
An Abundance of Katherines
“You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.”
John Green
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“You never get me. That’s the whole point.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“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.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“You should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as happy ending. There is so much to lose.”
John Green
Let it Snow
“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.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“You will go to the paper towns and you will never come back.”
John Green
Paper Towns
“Your now is not your forever.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
“You’re awfully philosophical for a girl that just got busted.”
John Green
Looking for Alaska
“You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.”
John Green
Turtles All the Way Down
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