Top 500 John Green Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Eternity bids thee to forget.”

— John Green

352. “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

353. “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

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

— John Green

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

— John Green

356. “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

357. “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

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

— John Green

359. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— John Green

361. “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

362. “You can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can’t say that Alabamans as a people are duly afraid of deep fryers.”

— John Green

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

— John Green

364. “I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I’ve never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero’s errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

— John Green

365. “When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.”

— John Green

366. “My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.”

— John Green

367. “Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business.”

— John Green

368. “You never really find answers, just new and deeper questions.”

— John Green

369. “You gave me a forever within the numbered days.”

— John Green

370. “Everyone wanted me to feed them that story – darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.”

— John Green

371. “I leaned in toward her, suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that we must kiss.”

— John Green

Featured in: Hipster Quotes

372. “And then I was asleep. That deep, can-still-taste-her-in-my-mouth sleep, that sleep that is not particularly restful but difficult to wake up from all the same.”

— John Green

373. “Nerd girls are the world’s greatest under-utilized romantic resource.”

— John Green

374. “To be abandoned like that! Shut out when you most need to be loved.”

— John Green

375. “I can’t imagine us saying these things to each other out loud. But even if I can’t imagine hearing these words, I can imagine living them. I don’t even picture it. Instead I’m in it. How I feel with him here. That peace. It would be so happy, and it makes me sad because it only exists in words.”

— John Green

376. “Nothing has ever looked like that ever in all of human history.”

— John Green

377. “The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won’t be able to give anything in exchange for my life. 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

378. “Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.”

— John Green

379. “You matter as much as the things that matter to you do.”

— John Green

380. “And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn’t planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together.”

— John Green

381. “The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.”

— John Green

382. “The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all.”

— John Green

383. “I don’t think we should see the world of books as fundamentally separate from the world of the Internet. Yes, the Internet contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, but it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books.”

— John Green

Featured in: Book Quotes

384. “In die Augen kann man jedem sehen. Aber jemand zu finden, der dieselbe Welt sieht, ist ziemlich selten.”

— John Green

385. “I am a brave warrior in my internal Battle of Valhalla.”

— John Green

386. “One of the things I like about making stuff in the age of the Internet, is that people make stuff in response to it. You can see people respond to your work visually or musically or with writing.”

— John Green

387. “You’re awfully philosophical for a girl that just got busted.”

— John Green

388. “Sometimes beautiful people have ugly hands.”

— John Green

389. “People are different when you can smell them and look up close, you know?”

— John Green

390. “Bro, it’s dark. You can’t go to a strange building with a mysterious address in the dark. Haven’t you ever seen a horror movie?”

— John Green

391. “We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.”

— John Green

392. “Incluso el silencio tiene una historia que contarte.”

— John Green

393. “In our hyper-secular world, worship is still inevitable. But it is vital to remember that our gods don’t choose us, we choose them.”

— John Green

394. “The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.”

— John Green

395. “You hear a lot about the benefits of insanity or whatever – like, Dr. Karen Singh had once told me this Edgar Allan Poe quote: “The question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.” I guess she was trying to make me feel better, but I find mental disorders to be vastly overrated. Madness, in my admittedly limited experience, is accompanied by no superpowers; being mentally unwell doesn’t make you loftily intelligent any more than having the flu does.”

— John Green

396. “My responsibility is to try to tell true stories. To me a true story is always hopeful, but never simply, uncomplicatedly happy.”

— John Green

397. “I’m not saying it was your fault. I’m saying it wasn’t nice.”

— John Green

398. “The voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.”

— John Green

399. “It’s not like I had some utterly poignant, well-lit memory of a healthy father pushing a healthy child and the child saying higher higher higher or some other metaphorically resonant moment. The swing set was just sitting there, abandoned, the two little swings hanging still and sad from a grayed plank of wood, the outline of the seats like a kid’s drawing of a smile.”

— John Green

400. “All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.”

— John Green