Top 500 John Green Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “If people could see me the way I see myself – if they could live in my memories – would anyone love me?”

— John Green

202. “In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt.”

— John Green

203. “I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?”

— John Green

204. “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.”

— John Green

205. “This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.”

— John Green

206. “I’d rather wonder than get answers I couldn’t live with.”

— John Green

207. “There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.”

— John Green

208. “This is so much fun, but I’m so sleepy. To be continued?”

— John Green

209. “For me, the hero’s journey is not the voyage from weakness to strength. The true hero’s journey is the voyage from strength to weakness.”

— John Green

210. “I do not say goodbye. I believe that’s one of the bullshitiest words ever invented. It’s not like you’re given the choice to say bad-bye, or awful-bye, or couldn’t-care-less-about-you-bye. Everytime you leave, it’s supposed to be a good one.”

— John Green

211. “Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”

— John Green

212. “The most important part of the body ain’t the heart or the lungs or the brain. The biggest, most important part of the body is the part that hurts.”

— John Green

213. “Scared isn’t a good excuse. Scared is the excuse everyone has always used.”

— John Green

214. “History doesn’t have a curfew.”

— John Green

215. “When we think of death, we often imagine it as happening in degrees: We think of a sick person becoming less and less alive until finally they are gone.”

— John Green

216. “We think that we are invincible because we are.”

— John Green

217. “What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.”

— John Green

218. “You may be smart, but I’ve been smart longer.”

— John Green

219. “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.”

— John Green

220. “There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.”

— John Green

221. “There’s your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. Find your way out of that maze.”

— John Green

222. “How do you just stop being terrified of getting left behind and ending up by yourself forever and not meaning anything to the world?”

— John Green

223. “I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting.”

— John Green

224. “Everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.”

— John Green

225. “My head was level with hers as we stared at each other from opposite sides of the glass. I don’t remember how it ended – if I went to bed or she did. In my memory, it doesn’t end. We just stay there, looking at each other, forever.”

— John Green

226. “But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.”

— John Green

227. “Colin thought about the dork mantra: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. What a dirty lie.”

— John Green

228. “In the darkest days, Lord puts the best people into your life.”

— John Green

229. “I can almost imagine a happiness without her, the ability to let her go, to feel our roots are connected even if I never see that leaf of grass again.?.”

— John Green

230. “You can’t just make me different, and then leave. Because I was fine before, Alaska. I was just fine with me and last words and school friends, and you can’t just make me different and then die.”

— John Green

231. “We acknowledge that being the person God made you cannot separate you from God’s love.”

— John Green

232. “At least I carpe’d that one diem.”

— John Green

233. “That’s the mystery, isn’t it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape – the world or the end of it?”

— John Green

234. “I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointments in the Department of Having a Voice that Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin.”

— John Green

235. “And I wrote my way out of the labyrinth.”

— John Green

236. “Night falls fast. Today is the past.”

— John Green

237. “I’m a grenade, I just want to stay away from people and read books, and think...”

— John Green

238. “I am a giant squid of anger.”

— John Green

239. “Everything that comes together falls apart.”

— John Green

240. “There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.”

— John Green

241. “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.”

— John Green

242. “Don’t worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway.”

— John Green

243. “There’s a stark difference between the words ‘prodigy’ and ‘genius.’ Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn; geniuses do.”

— John Green

244. “Maybe you are what you can’t not be.”

— John Green

245. “I wasn’t disappointed. My expectations had been met.”

— John Green

246. “We did a few things worth remembering, and I wish for someone to remember them.”

— John Green

247. “Maybe we’re grass – our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive.”

— John Green

248. “I know it’s impossible for you to see your peers this way, but when you’re older, you start to see them – the bad kids and the good kids and all kids – as people. They’re just people, who deserve to be cared for.”

— John Green

249. “Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I’m writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.”

— John Green

250. “I’ve always liked quiet people: You never know if they’re dancing in a daydream or if they’re carrying the weight of the world.”

— John Green