Top 500 John Green Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— John Green

260. “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

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

— John Green

262. “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

263. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

266. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— John Green

268. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

Featured in: Hipster Quotes

273. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— John Green

284. “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

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

— John Green

286. “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

287. “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

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

— John Green

289. “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

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

— John Green

291. “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

292. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

Featured in: Hipster Quotes

295. “In the contemporary world where things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold, you have to imagine a community where there is no centre. Hank, at the end of this year I started thinking that a lot of life is about doing things that don’t suck with people who don’t suck.”

— John Green

296. “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

297. “Das Leben ist Sehnsucht.”

— John Green

298. “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

299. “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

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

— John Green