John Green

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.

There’s a place in the brain for knowing what cannot be remembered.

There will come a time, when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything.

If the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.

[Not smoking the cigarette is] a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.

I started thinking about little kids putting a cylindrical peg through a circular hole, and how they do it over and over again for months when they figure it out, and how basketball was basically just a slightly more aerobic version of that same exercise.

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.

Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them. Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.

That’s the thing about pain, it demands to be felt.

There is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.

The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives.

That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.

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.

I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

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 have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories.

The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.

You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but A Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.

If you were to go [to the Rijksmuseum], and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

I thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience.

It seemed like forever ago, like we’d had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

Nostalgia is a side effect of dying.

I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get. But, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

Thinking you won’t die is yet another side effect of dying.

It’s almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than it says about either the person I was or the whatever I am now.

Grief does not change you, it reveals you.

I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person yet.

The voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths.

In general, watching children's television is a dark and surreal descent into madness where the characters on the screen talk directly to you.

That's the great thing about being in the third grade. If you've got one polysyllabic adjective, everyone thinks you're a genius.

The United States Congress, like a lot of rich people, lives in two houses.

In English, we don't have a word for people who aren't virgins. What the non-virgin lexical gap really made me think was that our obsession with sexual purity is such that once you are no longer this THING, you are indescribable.

Sexuality is important, but it's certainly not the most interesting or important thing happening to you right now. We live in a world that tells us that there are only two important things. One is the acquisition of goods and the other is either the acquisition or avoidance of sex, but it turns out that the question of who's a virgin and who's a virgout is not the most interesting question.

It has been my experience that maximizing income is a helluva lot less important than maximizing passion and fulfillment in your both professionally and personally.

When I was in college, I remember fearing that the dreary grind of adulthood would feature infinitely more existential dread than frat parties had, but the opposite has been true for me. I'm much less likely to feel that gnawing fear of aimlessness and nihilism than I used to be and that's partly because education gave me job opportunities, but it's mostly because education gave me perspective and context.

Grief does not change you... It reveals you.