Top 500 John Green Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can’t go all the way around.”

— John Green

204. “Stop thinking about the landing, because it’s all about falling.”

— John Green

205. “I love making YouTube videos. I love Tumblr, I love Twitter. I love talking with people I find interesting about stuff I find interesting, and the Internet is a great way to do that.”

— John Green

206. “I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.”

— John Green

207. “And people are moody, dude. You gotta get used to living with people.”

— John Green

208. “If people could see me the way I see myself – if they could live in my memories – would anyone love me?”

— John Green

209. “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

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

— John Green

211. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

Featured in: Fun Quotes

216. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

217. “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

218. “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

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

— John Green

Featured in: Hipster Quotes

220. “When you acknowledge that there is nothing repulsive or unforgivable or shameful about yourself, it becomes easier to be that authentic person and feel like you’re living a less performed life.”

— John Green

221. “Like the way the sun is right now, with the long shadows, and that kind of bright, soft light you get when the sun isn’t quite setting? That’s the light that makes everything better, everything prettier, and today, everything just seemed to be in that light.”

— John Green

222. “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

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

— John Green

224. “History doesn’t have a curfew.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

226. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

Featured in: Hipster Quotes

229. “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

230. “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

231. “If drunk were cookies, I’d be Famous Amos.”

— John Green

232. “Dutch is not so much a language as an ailment of the throat.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

234. “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

235. “I think forever is an incorrect concept.”

— John Green

236. “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

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

— John Green

238. “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

239. “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

240. “No reason to be angry. Anger just distracts from the all-encompassing sadness.”

— John Green

241. “People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.”

— John Green

242. “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

243. “In the Anthropocene there are no disinterested observers; there are only participants.”

— John Green

244. “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

245. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

248. “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

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

— John Green

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— John Green