John Green

Author

1977-08-24 – 1757-01-01

Quotes by John Green

• The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.— Easy enough to say when you're a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.

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• With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? - A.Y.'I'm going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,' he said.'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 don't want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.

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• We are taught that the hero's journey is the journey from weakness to strength. But I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero's journey is the journey from strength to weakness.

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• There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.

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• I have a date,' he explained. 'This is an emergency.' He paused to catch his breath. 'Do you know' - breath - 'how to iron?' I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled like an old woman who'd spent her youth sunbathing. If only the Colonel didn't ball up his every belonging and stuff it into random dresser drawers. 'I think you just turn it on and press it against the shirt, right?' I said. 'I don't know. I didn't even know we had an iron.' 'We don't. It's Takumi's. But Takumi doesn't know how to iron, either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, You're not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me. Oh God, I need to smoke. I need to smoke, but I can't reek when I see Sara's parents. Okay, screw it. We're going to smoke in the bathroom with the shower on. The shower has steam. Steam gets rid of wrinkles, right?

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• The prank is entitled Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm.

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• It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing attainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who's kinda bossy, then I had to basically start liking a whole different person.

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• A poem can't do its work if you only read snippets of it.

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• 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.

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• For me, at least, fiction is the only way i can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

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• I just want to domething that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.

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• The marks we leave are too often scars.

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• ...there are books...which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

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• I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I'd never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote (NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,

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• I think the future deserves our faith. But it is hard to argue with Emily Dickinson.

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• But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

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• The gray paint peels off the wall in odd and beautiful patterns, each cracked polygon of paint a snowflake of decay.

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• LoveI'm in love with you, he said quietly.Augustus,I said.I am, he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. 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.Augustus, I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back. I couldn't say anything back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.

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

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• 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.

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