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John Green (born 1977-08-24) is an American novelist and internet (YouTube) celebrity.
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- Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.
- I mean Hank, the movie was great, but the thirty minutes before the movie started was what I love about being a nerd. Because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. We don't have to be like, 'Oh yeah that purse is okay' or like, 'Yeah, I like that band's early stuff.' Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can't-control-yourself-love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they are saying is, 'You like stuff', which is just not a good insult at all.
- Good morning Hank. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: 'My older brother really needs a haircut!' Well, Hank, I've got one thing to say to that. Never![citation needed]
- Sock Puppet: "What is wrong with the world?"
John: "Brains hardwired for local concern in a world with global consequences."[citation needed]
- Nothing says, "A writer works from home" like jammy pants.[citation needed]
- The Venn Diagram of guys who don't like smart girls and guys you don't want to date is a circle.
- Is health care a privilege, or is it a right? If it's a privilege, even if it's a really desirable privilege like indoor pluming, we need to stop giving health care of any kind to uninsured people who can't pay for it in advance. But... ...I think the reason we continue to treat people who are uninsured is because we don't believe that health care is a privilege. We believe that it is a right. And if it is a right, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the responsibility of a government to protect that right.
- The fourth way to get a boy to like you is to be yourself. Now, I am contractually obligated as an adult to give that advice, even though it doesn't work. But yeah, be yourself, even though no one has any idea what it means to be yourself. Like whose self would I otherwise be being?[citation needed]
- [Twilight] argues that true love will triumph in the end, which may or may not be true, but if it's a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have.
- At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.
- You can say a lot of things about Alabama, but you can't say that *Alabamans as a people are unduly afraid of deep fryers.
- Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.
- "She has great breasts," the Colonel said without looking up from the whale.
"DO NOT OBJECTIFY WOMEN'S BODIES!" Alaska shouted. Now he looked up.
"Sorry, perky breasts."
"That's not any better!"
- "And we'll call you... hmmm. Pudge."
"Huh?"
"Pudge," the Colonel said. "Because you're skinny. It's called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now, let's go get some cigarettes and start this year off right."
- You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
- I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use his torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.
- Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.
- I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.
- Y'all smoke to enjoy it, I smoke to die.
- Is the labyrinth living or dying. Which is he trying to escape - the world or the end of it?
- God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.
- I'm just scared of ghosts, and home is full of them.
- How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?
- We had to forgive to survive the labyrinth.
- I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor with all my crooked heart.
- I may die young, but at least I'll die smart.
- The moment Colin sat down, Hollis asked Hassan, "Would you like to say grace?"
"Sure thing." Hassan cleared his throat. "Bismallah." Then he picked up his fork.
"That's it?" Hollis wondered.
"That's it. We are terse people. Terse, and also hungry."
- But mothers lie. It's in the job description.
- And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus. Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something.
- It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he'd ever gotten. And he'd gotten plenty.
- Missing her kept him awake more than coffee.
- Colin believed that the world contained exactly two kinds of people: Dumpers and Dumpees. A lot of people will claim to be both, but those people miss the point entirely: You are predisposed to either one fate or the other. Dumpers may not always be the heartbreakers, and the Dumpees may not always be the heartbroken. But everyone has a tendency.
- He just wanted to play robot, for God's sake. Was that so wrong?
- That smile could end wars and cure cancer.
- What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?
- Colin did not laugh. Instead he thought, Tampons have strings? Why? Of all the major human mysteries - God, the nature of the universe, etc. - he knew the least about tampons. To Colin, tampons were a little bit like grizzly bears: he was aware of their existence, but he'd never seen one in the wild, and didn't really care to.
- He'd never been all that good at math, but he was a goddamned world-famous expert in getting dumped
- People just liked Hassan, the way people like fast food and celebrities.
- It was, he thought, just like how authors always wrote things in ways other than how they actually happened.
- He wanted to draw out the moment before the moment - because as good as kissing feels, nothing feels as good as the anticipation of it.
- The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. 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.
- Maybe all the strings inside of him broke, maybe all his ships sunk, or maybe we're grass, our roots so interdependent that none us are dead as long as someone is still alive. What I mean is, we don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors. But the one you choose matters because the metaphors have implications.
- Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.
- "It's a penis," Margo said, "in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state; it may have an illustrious history, but it sure isn't big.
- "The thing about That Guy Is a Gigolo," Radar says, "I mean the thing about it as a game, is that in the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined."
- That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty... But I'm not pretty, not close up anyway. Generally, the closer people get to me the less hot they find me.
- It's so hard to leave - until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.
- You listen to people so you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to.
- It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.
- "Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is actually used to cut diamonds," I added.
- Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. it's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.
- It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.
- 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.
- Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington's house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.
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