Top 500 John Green Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

204. “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

205. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

208. “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

209. “History doesn’t have a curfew.”

— John Green

210. “So I let her go, too. And I’m sorry.”

— John Green

211. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

215. “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

216. “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

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

— John Green

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— John Green

222. “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

223. “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

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

— John Green

225. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

228. “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

229. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

232. “I am a giant squid of anger.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

234. “Everything that comes together falls apart.”

— John Green

235. “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

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

— John Green

237. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

242. “I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.”

— John Green

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water’s death with was Augustus Waters.”

— John Green

247. “And it was just the three of us – three bodies and two people – the three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us too much keeping us from one another.”

— John Green

248. “I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”

— John Green

249. “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.”

— John Green

250. “I believe in that line from An Imperial Affliction. ‘The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.’ That’s God, I think, the rising sun, and the light is too bright and her eyes are losing but they aren’t lost.”

— John Green