Top 500 John Green Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Truth resists simplicity.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

53. “Because you’re only thinking they-might-not-like-me-they-might-not-like-me, and guess what? When you act like that, no one likes you.”

— John Green

54. “March 4th, the only day that is also a sentence.”

— John Green

55. “If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

57. “I get it now. I get it. The things you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end.”

— John Green

58. “We all use the future to escape the present.”

— John Green

59. “Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die.”

— John Green

60. “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.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

62. “That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.”

— John Green

63. “When things break, it’s not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It’s because a little piece gets lost – the two remaining ends couldn’t fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.”

— John Green

64. “I’m not sure if I’m depressed. I mean, I’m not exactly sad. But I’m not exactly happy either. I can laugh and joke and smile during the day, But sometimes when I’m alone at night I forget how to feel.”

— John Green

65. “Love is keeping the promise anyway.”

— John Green

66. “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.”

— John Green

67. “Isn’t it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”

— John Green

68. “I don’t know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.”

— John Green

69. “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.”

— John Green

70. “As much as life can suck, it always beats the alternative.”

— John Green

71. “How strange and how lovely it is to be anything at all.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

74. “The funny thing about writing is that whether you’re doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That’s actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.”

— John Green

75. “Maybe all the strings inside him broke.”

— John Green

76. “Reading forces you to be quiet in a world that no longer makes place for that.”

— John Green

77. “People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.”

— John Green

78. “Girls think they’re only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I’m going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.”

— John Green

79. “You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.”

— John Green

80. “There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.”

— John Green

81. “Not that smart. Not that hot. Not that nice. Not that funny. That’s me: I’m not that.”

— John Green

82. “Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.”

— John Green

83. “What matters to you defines your mattering.”

— John Green

84. “Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.”

— John Green

85. “I don’t think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

87. “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.”

— John Green

88. “We didn’t talk much. But we didn’t need to.”

— John Green

89. “Do you know what your problem is? You can’t live with the idea that someone might leave.”

— John Green

90. “You’re arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that’s a lie, and you know it.”

— John Green

91. “Stupid human voices always ruining everything.”

— John Green

92. “All sorts of yayness floods my brain. Love is such a drug.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

95. “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.”

— John Green

96. “When it works, anticipation is far more fulfilling than surprise, because we are reminded that a sunrise is precisely as magnificent as it is inevitable.”

— John Green

97. “It’s not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That’s the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?”

— John Green

98. “People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.”

— John Green

99. “I’m really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what.”

— John Green

100. “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. – ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER.”

— John Green