John Green

“dating you would be like a series of unnecessary root canals interspersed with occasional makeout sessions.”

“Love is tied to truth.”

“As lives go, I'll take the quietly desperate over the radically bipolar.”

“I have to tell you man, that my stalker meter is kind of registering in the red zone right now.”

“I call my mom from the car. I tell her that Neutral Milk Hotel is playing at the Hideout and she says, "Who? What? You're hiding out?" And then I hum a few bars of one of their songs and Mom says, "Oh, I know that song. It's on the mix you made me," and I say, "Right," and she says, "Well you have to be back by eleven," and I say, "Mom this is a historical event. History doesn't have a curfew," and she says, "Back by eleven," and I say, "Fine. Jesus," and then she has to go cut cancer out of someone.”

“If people could see me the way I see myself - if they could live in my memories - would anyone love me?”

“I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.”

“He reached up t0 grab one and came down with several, and they kept coming, washing over him, floating all around him. Never have tampon strings seemed so beautiful as they rolled up and down with the wind, landing on the ground and then twirling and floating up again, falling and rising and falling and rising.”

“We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.”

“Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”

“He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.”

“The beautiful thing about driving was that it stole just enough of his attention - car parked on the side, maybe a cop, slow to speed limit, time to pass this sixteen-wheeler, turn signal, check rearview, crane neck to check blind spot and yes, okay, left lane.”

“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 on in the wild, and didn't really care to.”

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”

“Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.”

“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.”

“You can learn a lot about government from donkey balls.”

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

“The pure and simple truth Is rarely pure and never simple.What's a boy to doWhen lies and truth are both sinful?”

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

“Not that smart. Not that hot. Not that nice. Not that funny. That's me: I'm not that.”

“One of these days, I keep telling myself, you'll learn to truly shut up and not care. And until then...well, until then I'll keep taking deep breaths because it feels like the wind got knocked out of me. For all my not crying, I sure feel a hell of a lot worse than I did at the end of All Dogs go to Heaven.”

“Nothing's wrong. Everything's right. Things couldn't be righter. Things could be less tired. They could be less busy. They could be less caffeinated. But they couldn't be righter. ”

“I've never known before what it feels like to want someone - not to want to hook up with them or whatever, but to want them, to want them. And now I do. So maybe I do believe in epiphanies.”

“I lean in this time, and she doesn't turn away. It's cold, and our lips are dry, noses a little wet, foreheads sweaty beneath wool hats. I can't touch her face, even though I want to, because I'm wearing gloves. But God, when her lips come apart, everything turns warm and her sugar sweet breath is in my mouth, and I probably taste like hot dogs but I don't care. She kisses like a sweet devouring, and I don't know where to touch her because I want all of her. I want to touch her knees and hips and her stomach and her back and her everything, but we're encased in all these clothes, so we're just two marshmallows bumping against each other, and she smiles at me while still kissing because she knows how ridiculous it is, too.”

“Anything that happens all at once is just as likely to unhappen all at once, you know?”

“You can say a lot of bad things about Tiny Cooper. I know, because I have said them. But for a guy who knows absolutely nothing about how to conduct his own relationships, Tiny Cooper is kind of brilliant when it comes to dealing with other people's heartbreak. Tiny is like some gigantic sponge soaking up the pain of lost love everywhere he goes.”

“You like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot. ”

“It's like people believe all you need to do is like the same bands in order to be soulmates. Or book. Oh my god...you like The Outsiders too...it's like we're the same person! No, we're not. It's like we have the same English teacher. There's a difference.”

“Caring doesn't sometimes lead to misery. It always does.”

“I had no doubt that Tiny thought he got depressed, but that was probably because he had nothing to compare it to. Still, what could I say? that I didn't just feel depressed - instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones? That if he got blue, I got black? That I hated those pills so much because I knew how much I relied on them to live? No, I couldn't say any of this because when it all comes down to it, nobody wants to hear it. No matter how much they like you or love you, they don't want to hear it.”

“It's easy to forget how full the world is of people, full of bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”

“I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.”

“What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.”

“NO. No no no. I don't want to screw you. I just love you. When did who you want to screw become the whole game? Since when is the person you want to screw the only person you get to love? It's so stupid, Tiny! I mean, Jesus, who even gives a fuck about sex?! People act like it's the most important thing humans do, but come on. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them? Those are important questions, I guess. But they're not that important. You know what's important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don't even know why he needs you? Whose drunken nose would you pick?!”

“Mom: 'I really have to stop doing this. I need to get a life.'I think she's directing this at herself, or the universe, not really at me. Still, I can't help thinking that 'getting a life' is something only a complete idiot could believe. Like you can just drive to a store and get a life. See it in its shiny box and look inside the plastic window and catch a glimpse of yourself in a new life and say, 'Wow, I look much happier - I think this is the life I need to get!" Take it to the counter, ring it up, put it on your credit card. If getting a life was that easy, we'd be one blissed-out race. But we're not. So it's like, Mom, your life isn't out there waiting, so don't think all you have to do is find it and get it. No, your life is right here. And yeah, it sucks. Lives usually do. So if you want things to change, you don't need to get a life. You need to get off your ass.”

“Why don’t we break up? I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do.”

“I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn’t sound dumb.”

“I must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?”

“Some people have lives; some people have music.”

“When it comes to girls (and in Colin's case, it so often did), everyone has a type. Colin Singleton's type was not physical but linguistic: he liked Katherines. And not Katies or Kats or Kitties or Cathys or Rynns or Trinas or Kays or Kates or, god forbid, Catherines. K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E. He had dated 19 girls. All of them had been named Katherine. And all of them- every single solitary one- had dumped him.”

“The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.”

“Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.”

“You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”

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

“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.”

“Maybe all the strings inside him broke.”

“I expertly angled my raison bran to accomodate the g-forces.”

“Thomas Edison's last words were "It's very beautiful over there". I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.”

“Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning,' and Isben looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he died.”