Top 500 John Green Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “It’s just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.”

— John Green

302. “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

303. “I think about how much depends upon a best friend. Then you wake up in the morning you swing your legs out of bed and you put your feet on the ground and you stand up. You don’t scoot to the edge of the bed and look down to make sure the floor is there. The floor is always there. Until it’s not.”

— John Green

304. “It was psychological trick called empathic listening. You say what the person is feeling so they feel understood.”

— John Green

305. “Love is just a shout in the void.”

— John Green

306. “She was not an adventure, she was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”

— John Green

307. “If you don’t live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either a life or a death that means anything.”

— John Green

308. “Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain. Maybe we needed to give shape to the opaque, deep-down pain that evades both sense and senses.”

— John Green

309. “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

310. “You never know. It’s just. It’s like. POOF. And you’re gone.”

— John Green

311. “I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I loved.”

— John Green

312. “I started thinking about turtles all the way down. I was thinking that maybe the old lady and the scientist were both right. Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.”

— John Green

313. “Because memories fall apart, too. And you’re left with nothing.”

— John Green

314. “We never really talked much or even looked at each other, but it didn’t matter because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe even more intimate than eye contact anyway. I mean, anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”

— John Green

315. “So why don’t you go home for vacations?? I asked her. I’m just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them.”

— John Green

316. “I like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that’s what life is like.”

— John Green

317. “Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.”

— John Green

318. “She was loved deeply, but not widely.”

— John Green

319. “Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.”

— John Green

320. “Observation: It would be awesome to fly in a superfast airplane that could chase the sunrise around the world for a while.”

— John Green

321. “You see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town.”

— John Green

322. “Easy comfort isn’t comforting.”

— John Green

323. “But mothers lie. It’s in the job description.”

— John Green

324. “Nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.”

— John Green

325. “That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.”

— John Green

326. “The five of us walking confidently in a row, I’d never felt cooler. The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible. The plan may have had faults, but we did not.”

— John Green

327. “There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.”

— John Green

328. “The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.”

— John Green

329. “Don’t swear in the Literal Heart of Jesus.”

— John Green

330. “Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it.”

— John Green

331. “The easiest way to solve a mystery is to decide that there is no mystery to solve.”

— John Green

332. “Every second of your definitionally temporary consciousness, you are choosing how you spend something that will not last forever.”

— John Green

333. “The future will erase everything – there’s no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.”

— John Green

334. “She waited for me to play out the string, to find the place where she had stopped and was waiting for me, to follow the breadcrumb tail until it dead-ended into her.”

— John Green

335. “But we both know that okay is a very flirty word. Okay is BURSTING with sensuality.”

— John Green

336. “I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.”

— John Green

337. “Eternity bids thee to forget.”

— John Green

338. “The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.”

— John Green

339. “Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of the stars to cross...”

— John Green

340. “If by that you mean that I dislike celebrity magazines, prefer food to anorexia, refuse to watch TV shows about models, and hate the color pink, then yes. I am proud to be not really a girl.”

— John Green

341. “She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, “Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.” – Alaska.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

344. “The miracle and hope of human consciousness is that we can still conceive of boundlessness.”

— John Green

345. “Indiana,’ he said. ‘They steal the land from the Indians and leave the name, yes?”

— John Green

346. “But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.”

— John Green

347. “If you act out of a paranoid fear of something happening, you will always make that thing happen.”

— John Green

348. “My inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves.”

— John Green

349. “Being in a relationship, that’s something you choose. Being friends, that’s something you just are.”

— John Green

350. “I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you’re trying to be a writer because it’s the only apprenticeship we have, it’s the only way of learning how to write a story.”

— John Green