John Green

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that m...”

“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.”

“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.”

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”

“My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.”

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”

“Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”

“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”

“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. T...”

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”

“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.”

“You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”

“Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“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.”

“It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.”

“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.”

“You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”

“Some people have lives; some people have music.”

“I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.”

“I may die young, but at least I'll die smart.”

“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. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did a...”

“When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.”

“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”

“Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should've gotte...”

“What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.”

“Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”

“If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”

“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. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, b...”

“Have you really read all those books in your room?” Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have...”

“They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting.”

“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.”

“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.”

“But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”

“What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have...”

“If you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain.”

“I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”

“The town was paper, but the memories were not.”

“Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always”

“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.”

“You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”

“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.”

“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation...”

“I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbd...”

“Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.”

“Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war”

“I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.”

“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 w...”

“I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”

“And long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.”

“We are all barnacles on the container ship of consciousness”

“That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence”

“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.”

“Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, “I won’t be a mother anymore.” The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relation...”

“At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.”

“I'll fight it. I'll fight it for you. Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I'm okay. I'll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time.”

“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.”

“Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence”

“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.”

“Nerd girls are the world’s most underutilized romantic resource. And guys, do not tell me that nerd girls are not hot because that shows a Paris Hilton-esque failure to understand hotness.”

“You like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.”

“I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life..”

“You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you. All efforts to save me from you will fail.”

“You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.”

“If people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane.”

“I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.”

“At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.”

“As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.”