John Green (b. 1977)

Quotes

• Just a word of advice. Whenever you're furious with your parents or you think they're terrible, just remember, you vomited on them and they kept you.

• Ya gotta live somewhere, but also you GET to live somewhere.

• He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

• What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?

• How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.

• ...myopia. He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

• You can see into the future if you have a basic understanding of how people are likely to act.

• Maybe I want strangers to think I’m cool since people who actually know me don’t.

• He liked the idea of coffee quite a lot—a warm drink that gave you energy and had been for centuries associated with sophisticates and intellectuals. But coffee itself tasted to him like caffeinated stomach bile.

• I don’t think God gives a shit if we have a dog or if a woman wears shorts. I think He gives a shit about whether you’re a good person.

• 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.

• There’s some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.

• The best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.

• The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.

• How you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do.

• You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

• Breaking up isn’t something that gets done to you; it’s something that happens with you.

• That’s who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.

• The future will erase everything—there’s no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.

• Stories don’t just make us matter to each other—maybe they’re also the only way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long.