Top 500 John Green Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water’s death with was Augustus Waters.”

— John Green

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “The opportunity of studying history, is the opportunity to experience empathy.”

— John Green

257. “I is the hardest word to define.”

— John Green

258. “Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can’t do that until your life has grown roots.”

— John Green

259. “They love their hair because they’re not smart enough to love something more interesting.”

— John Green

260. “I’m a bad boyfriend. She’s a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other.”

— John Green

261. “Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center.”

— John Green

262. “I, a singular proper noun, would go on, if always in a conditional tense.”

— John Green

263. “The Romans knew it: quod me alit me extinguit, they said: That which nourishes me, extinguishes me.”

— John Green

264. “We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.”

— John Green

265. “I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”

— John Green

266. “Gratitude is the proper response for the absolute astonishment of getting to be alive, and aware, and an essential part of this crazy, sprawling story.”

— John Green

267. “All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.”

— John Green

268. “Life is a series of choices between wonders.”

— John Green

269. “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

270. “And I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart slowly, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and nothing but herself and her mom in those last moments as she spent as a person.”

— John Green

271. “I’m not asexual. I’m arelationshipal.”

— John Green

272. “And so much depends, I told Augustus, upon a blue sky cut open by the branches of the trees above. So much depends upon the transparent G-tube erupting from the gut of the blue-lipped boy. So much depends upon the observer of the universe.”

— John Green

273. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.”

— John Green

274. “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world monocular.”

— John Green

275. “Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.”

— John Green

276. “We all romanticize the people we adore.”

— John Green

277. “Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness.”

— John Green

278. “Do not worry too much about your lawn. You will soon find if you haven’t already that almost every adult American devotes tremendous time and money to the maintenance of an invasive plant species called turf grass that we can’t eat. I encourage you to choose better obsessions.”

— John Green

279. “We Play the broken string of our instruments one last time.”

— John Green

280. “No one says goodbye unless they want to see you again.”

— John Green

281. “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

282. “Not your fault, Hazel Grace. We’re all just side effects, right?” “‘Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness,’” I said, quoting AIA.”

— John Green

283. “At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.”

— John Green

284. “Meriwether Lewis’s last words were, ‘I am not a coward, but I am so strong. So hard to die.’ I don’t doubt that it is, but it cannot be much harder than being left behind.”

— John Green

285. “Come over here so I can examine your face with my hands and see deeper into your soul than a sighted person ever could.”

— John Green

286. “At some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too.”

— John Green

287. “But you give your thoughts too much power, Aza. Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.”

— John Green

288. “We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations.”

— John Green

289. “People believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

291. “There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.”

— John Green

292. “You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.”

— John Green

293. “Mental health days only exist for people who have the luxury of saying ‘I don’t want to deal with things today’ and then can take the whole day off, while the rest of us are stuck fighting the fights we always fight, with no one really caring one way or another, unless...”

— John Green

294. “The worse the haircut, the better the man.”

— John Green

295. “Das Leben ist Sehnsucht.”

— John Green

296. “We’re invisible. I’ve never been here with someone else. It’s different being invisible with someone.”

— John Green

297. “What’s the meaning of life? Other people.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

300. “You get all these friends just when you don’t need friends anymore.”

— John Green