John Green

“Ben Starling, you better not have bought your token black friend a racist shirt”

“Something about me has always liked the drama and inconvience of bad weather. The worse the better, really.”

“Az emberek, gondoltam, biztonságra vágynak. Képtelenek elviselni a gondolatot, hogy szeretteik már nem léteznek, és magukat sem tudják nem létezőnek elképzelni. Végül azt írtam, hogy az emberek azért hisznek a túlvilágban, mert nem tudják elviselni, hogy ne így tegyenek.”

“Just move to the Internet, its great here. We get to live inside where the weather is always awesome.”

“The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves”

“Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.”

“Every year, many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you.”

“Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about, while reading about them. That’s why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the author intended the symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as a we ourselves.”

“Author's NoteThis is not so much an author's note as an author's reminder of what was printed in small type a few pages ago: This book is a work of fiction. I made it up.Neither novels or their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.I appreciate your cooperation in this matter.”

“Take a picture of this so Isaac can see it when they invent robot eyes.”

“Dad had a sign of his own. MY BEAUTIFUL FAMILY, it read, and then underneath that (AND GUS).”

“Mom sobbed something into Dad's chest that I wish I hadn't heard, and that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said, "I won't be a mom anymore." It gutted me pretty badly.”

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

“They were angry, I thought. Horrified. These teenagers, with their hormones, making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.”

“So Zeno is most famous for his tortoise paradox. Let us imagine that you are in a race with a tortoise. The tortoise has a ten-yard head start. In the time it takes you to run that ten yards, the tortoise has moved one yard. And then in the time it takes you to make up that distance, the tortoise goes a bit farther, and so on forever. You are faster than the tortoise but you can never catch him; you can only decrease his lead.”

“People always get used to beauty though.”

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

“He responded a few minutes later.Okay.I wrote back.Okay.He responded:Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!”

“If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be my flowers.”

“Egész életedet labirintusba zárva töltöd, azon töprengsz, hogyan szabadulsz ki egy nap, és milyen nagyszerű érzés lesz. Elképzeled a jövődet, de soha nem valósítod meg. Csak arra használod a jövőt, hogy segítségével elmenekülhess a jelenből.”

“More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someonewho might have loved you back but can't due to deadness, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi's headrest, and Icried, whimpering, and I didn't even feel sadness so much as pain.”

“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.”

“And I can’t help but feel that Whitman, for all his blustering beauty, might have been just a bit too optimistic. We can hear others, and we can travel to them without moving, and we can imagine them, and we are all connected one to the other by a crazy root system like so many leaves of grass — but the game makes me wonder whether we can really ever fully become one another.”

“I'm full of shit. I'm never myself. I've got a Southern accent around the oldsters; I'm a nerd for graphs and deep thoughts around you; I'm Miss Bubbly Pretty Princess with Colin. I'm nothing. The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.”

“Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness.”

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

“Colin emphatically pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading. "Did you like it?" His dad asked."Yup," Colin said. He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.”

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

“The beers all broke," he says again, and nods toward the split-open cooler, gallons of foaming liquid pouring out from inside it. We try to call Ben buy he can't hear us because he's to busy screaming, "IT'S GONNA BLOW!" as he races acrossthe field. His graduation robe flies up in the gray dawn, his bony bare ass esposed.”

“It's gas! It's gonna blow!" Ben shouts. He throws open the passenger door and takes off, running in a panic. He hurdles a split-rail fence and tears across a hay field. I get out as well, but not in quite the same hurry. Radar is outside, too, and as Ben hauls ass, Radar is laughing. "It's the beer," he says.”

“3 whole Catfish, Wrapped separatelyVeet (It’s for Shaving your legs Only you don’t Need A razor. It’s with all the Girlycosmetic stuff)Vaselinesix pack, Mountain DewOne dozen Tulipsone Bottle Of waterTissuesOne Can of blue Spray paint”

“Harry Potter isn’t real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I don’t know who you are or what your name is or where you’re from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter’s real and you’re not.”

“A dolgok sose úgy történnek, ahogy elképzelem őket.”

“Without pain, we couldn't know joy.”

“So I wasn't lying, exactly. I was just choosing among truths.”

“Patience, grasshopper," I counseled. "You don't want to seem overeager.""Right, that's why I said tomorrow," he said. "I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.”

“I don't know why boys expect us to like boy movies. We don't expect them to like girl movies.”

“They don't kill you unless you light them," he said as Mom arrived at the curb. "And I've never lit one. It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you dont' give it the power to do its killing.”

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

“I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?”

“You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.”

“It was not an eventful day. I should have done extraordinary things. I should have sucked the marrow out of life. But on that day, I slept eighteen hours out of a possible twenty-four.”

“Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.”

“Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.”

“the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.”

“Writing does not resurrect. It buries.”

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

“When you’re as charming and physically attractive as myself, it’s easy enough to win over people you meet. But getting strangers to love you...now, that’s the trick.”

“Ignorance is bliss”

“All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.”