John Green (b. 1977)

Quotes

• 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.