Top 500 John Green Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.”

— John Green

452. “He’s in that vast boy middle,” she said. “Like, good-looking enough that I’m willing to be won over. The whole problem with boys is that ninety-nine percent of them are, like, okay. If you could dress and hygiene them properly, and make them stand up straight and listen to you and not be dumbasses, they’d be totally acceptable.”

— John Green

453. “He responded a few minutes later. Okay. I wrote back. Okay. He responded: Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!”

— John Green

454. “Our hearts were broken in the same places. That’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.”

— John Green

455. “True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice on the matter.”

— John Green

456. “I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it’s impossible to tell because I’m underwater.”

— John Green

457. “I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.”

— John Green

458. “It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it. Because you can’t be sure, you know?”

— John Green

459. “Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.”

— John Green

460. “Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.”

— John Green

461. “This star won’t go out. And it won’t. we won’t let it.”

— John Green

462. “So she became impulsive, scared by her inaction into perpetual action.”

— John Green

463. “Life tries to crush her, but only succeeded in making a diamond.”

— John Green

464. “She’s cute, I thought, but you don’t need to like a girl who treats you like you’re ten: You’ve already got a mom.”

— John Green

465. “She was up and down – from fire and brimstone to smoke and ashes.”

— John Green

466. “I tried – I swear I tried. But you didn’t want to hear what I was saying, and I used that as an excuse to let it go on.”

— John Green

467. “The human tongue is like wasabi: it’s very powerful, and should be used sparingly.”

— John Green

468. “Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour – but in face I am that kind of person.”

— John Green

469. “I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can’t due to deadness.”

— John Green

470. “The venn diagram of boys who don’t like smart girls and boys you don’t wanna date is a circle.”

— John Green

471. “Physical intimacy isn’t and can never be an effective substitute for emotional intimacy.”

— John Green

472. “The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.”

— John Green

473. “I liked Augustus Waters. I really, really really liked him. I liked the way his story ended with someone else. I liked his voice. I liked that he took existentially-fraught free throws.”

— John Green

474. “Mom sobbed something into Dad’s chest that I wish I hadn’t heard, and that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said, “I won’t be a mom anymore.” It gutted me pretty badly.”

— John Green

475. “Dear Jane, Just so you know: e. e. cummings cheated on both of his wives. With prostitutes. Yours, Will Grayson.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

477. “I tried to tell myself that it could be worse, that the world was not a wish-granting factory, that I was living with cancer not dying of it, that I mustn’t let it kill me before it kills me,...”

— John Green

478. “I wouldn’t have cared if my girlfriend was a Jaguar-driving Cyclops with a beard – I’d have been grateful just to have someone to make out with.”

— John Green

479. “That’s why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates a adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”

— John Green

480. “All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.”

— John Green

481. “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.”

— John Green

482. “Our role as humans is to recognize the complexity of others.”

— John Green

483. “When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can’t really fully and honestly take those back...”

— John Green

484. “Youth is counted sweetest by those who are no longer young.”

— John Green

485. “She’s still taking on water.” A desert blessing, an ocean curse.”

— John Green

486. “Just spend a few more months playing video games. That hand-eye coordination will come in handy when you get to third base.”

— John Green

487. “Pudge, my friend, we are indefuckingstructible.”

— John Green

488. “She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.”

— John Green

489. “To be human is to catch the falling person.”

— John Green

490. “I lit up like a Christmas tree, Hazel Grace. The lining of my chest, my left hip, my liver, everywhere.”

— John Green

491. “The true ninja doesn’t make a splash at all.”

— John Green

492. “If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms. Do me a favor and shoot me.”

— John Green

493. “We only have so long to play in the dirt and ask questions of rivers.”

— John Green

494. “You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.”

— John Green

495. “Only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn’t unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn’t want to.”

— John Green

496. “I was a bit of a Victorian Lady, fainting-wise.”

— John Green

497. “In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business – and I wanted to try to reflect that.”

— John Green

498. “It looked like an old painting, but real – everything achingly idyllic in the morning light – and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.”

— John Green

499. “We are all going,” McKinley said to his wife, and we sure are. There’s your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. Find your way out of that maze.”

— John Green

500. “But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him.”

— John Green