John Green has a remarkable way of capturing the complexities of life, love, and hope through his words. Whether you’re looking for motivation, comfort, or a fresh perspective, his quotes offer profound insights that resonate deeply. Explore this curated collection of the top 84 inspirational John Green quotes to spark your creativity and uplift your spirit.
1. “Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.” - John Green
2. “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.” - Francois Rabelais
3. “If people could see me the way I see myself - if they could live in my memories - would anyone love me?” - John Green
4. “That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.” - John Green
5. “It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.” - John Green
6. “Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, “I won’t be a mother anymore.” The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relationship survives. (It changes, but it survives.)” - John Green
7. “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 hurricane.” - John Green
8. “What's the meaning of life? Other people.” - John Green
9. “Collin Singleton could no more stay cool than a blue whale could stay skinny or Bangladesh could stay rich” - John Green
10. “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?” - John Green
11. “There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came. His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. “My name is Augustus Waters,” he said. “I’m seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I’m just here today at Isaac’s request.”“And how are you feeling?” asked Patrick.“Oh, I’m grand.” Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.” - John Green
12. “I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)” - John Green
13. “A Margo for each of us--and each more mirror than window.” - John Green
14. “My heart is really pounding," I said."That's how you know you're having fun," Margo said.” - John Green
15. “Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.” - John Green
16. “There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.” - John Green
17. “I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?” - John Green
18. “I don't believe in prom,' I reminded her as she rounded a corner. I expertly angled my raisin bran to accomodate the g-forces. I'd done this before.” - John Green
19. “The last time I was this scared, I peed myself.""The last time I was this scared," Radar says, "I actually had to face a Dark Lord in order to make the world safe for wizards.” - John Green
20. “I know it's impossible for you to see your peers this way, but when you're older, you start to see them--the bad kids and the good kids and all kids--as people. They're just people, who deserve to be cared for.” - John Green
21. “But I had to kill you, because the only other possible ending was us doing it, which I wasn't really emotionally ready to write about at ten.''Fair enough,' I say. 'But in the revision, I want to get some action.” - John Green
22. “I can almost imagine a happiness without her, the ability to let her go, to feel our roots are connected even if I never see that leaf of grass again.” - John Green
23. “I am thinking that I don't want this to happen. I don't want to die. I don't want my friends to die. And to be honest, as the time slows down and my hands are in the air, I am afforded the chance to think one more thought, and I think about her. I blame her for this ridiculous, fatal chase--for putting us at risk, for making me into the kind of jackass who would stay up all night and drive too fast. I would not be dying were it not for her. I would have stayed home, as I have always stayed home, and I would've been safe, and I would have done the one thing I have always wanted to do, which is to grow up.” - John Green
24. “And then the line was quite but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.” - John Green
25. “Headline?" he asked."'Swing Set Needs Home,'" I said."'Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,'" he said."'Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,'" I said.” - John Green
26. “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
27. “We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.” - John Green
28. “I am in the midst of a soliloquy! I wrote this out and memorized it and if you interrupt me I will completely screw it up,' Augustus interrupted. 'Please to be eating your sandwich and listening.” - John Green
29. “It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.” - John Green
30. “Is it still cool to go to the mall?' she asked. 'I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what's cool,' I answered.” - John Green
31. “All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing.” - John Green
32. “It's just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations.''Right, it's primarily his hotness,' I said.'It can be sort of blinding,' he said.'It actually did blind our friend Isaac,' I said.'Terrible tragedy, that. But can I help my own deadly beauty?''You cannot.''It is my burden, this beautiful face.''Not to mention your body.''Seriously, don't even get me started on my hot bod. You don't want to see me naked, Dave. Seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace's breath away,' he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.” - John Green
33. “I imagined the Augustus Waters analysis of that comment: If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing physical basketballs? Who makes the basketballs in question? Are there less fortunate souls in heaven who work in a celestial basketball factory so that I can play? Or did an omnipotent God create the basketballs out of the vacuum of space? Is this heaven in some kind of unobservable universe where the laws of physics don't apply, and if so, why in the hell would I be playing basketball when I could be flying or reading or looking at beautiful people or something else I actually enjoy? It's almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than either the person I was or whatever I am now.” - John Green
34. “That's why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates a adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.” - John Green
35. “there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars” - John Green
36. “What's the point in being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.” - John Green
37. “So I was ugly. I was never fat, really, and I never wore headgear or had zits or anything. But I was ugly. I don't even know how ugly and pretty get decided - maybe there's like a secret cabal of boys who meet in the locker room and decide who's ugly and who's hot, because as far as I can remember, there was no such thing as a hot fourth-grader. - Lindsey Lee Wells” - John Green
38. “Incidentally, did you know that the whole eight glasses a day thing is complete bullshit and has no scientific basis? So many things are like that. Everyone just assumes they're true, because people are basically lazy and incurious, which incidentally is one of those words that sounds like it wouldn't be a word but is.” - John Green
39. “Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.” - John Green
40. “You matter as much as the things that matter to you. And I got so backwards trying to matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do.” - John Green
41. “Caroline was always moody and miserable, but I liked it. I liked feeling as if she had chosen me as the only person in the world not to hate, and so we spent all this time together just ragging on everyone, you know?” - John Green
42. “Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should've gotten more.''Seventeen,' Gus corrected.'I'm assuming you've got some time, you interupting bastard.'I'm telling you,' Isaac continued, 'Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interupt you at his own funeral. And he was pretentious: Sweet Jesus Christ, that kid never took a piss without pondering the abundant metaphorical resonances of human waste production. And he was vain: I do not believe I have ever met a more physically attractive person who was more acutely aware of his own physical attractiveness.'But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him.'I was kind of crying by then.” - John Green
43. “The fundamental mistake I had always made - and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make - was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.” - John Green
44. “¿Qué más? Ella es tan hermosa. No te cansas de verla. Nunca te preocupas si es más inteligente que tú: sabes que lo es. Es graciosa sin querer serlo. La amo. Soy tan afortunado de amarla” - John Green
45. “From the front Rdar announces, "Don't you go talking bad about GoFast bars. Do you want me to stop this car?""Whenever I eat a GoFast bar," Ben says, "I'm always like, 'So this is what blood tastes like to mosquitoes.” - John Green
46. “pg. 231-232: They'd given me a minivan. They could have picked any car and they picked a minivan. A minivan. O God of the Vehicular Justice, why dost thou mock me? Minivan, you albatross around my neck! You mark of Cain! You wretched beast high ceilings and few horsepower!” - John Green
47. “there are books which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.” - John Green
48. “And even though he felt pitiful and ridiculous, he didn't want it to end, because he knew the absence of her would hurt more than any breakup ever could.” - John Green
49. “But what could I lose by continuing that had not already been lost?” - John Green
50. “being in a bad mood with your friends beats being in a bad mood without them.” - John Green
51. “Her primary reason for living and my primary reason for living were awfully entangled.” - John Green
52. “It's hard as hell to hold onto your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes, and that's what I was thinking about as we hunted for bad guys through the ruins of a city that didn't exist.” - John Green
53. “This squirrel is inadequately afraid of humans! Squirrel, I am a threat to you! We are enemies! Please get off my bench! Oh, god! Oh, god! Don't touch me—oh, god!” - John Green
54. “Ultimately what I like about reading together is that we all make it happen together. Of course even amid shared experience we’re still alone… each reading of each book is unique. But what a comfort it is to share readings and experiences. How lucky we are when we get to be alone together.” - John Green
55. “We had to forgive to survive the labyrinth” - John Green
56. “We are greater than the sum of our parts.” - John Green
57. “There's no way of knowing that your last good day is Your Last Good Day. At the time, it is just another good day.” - John Green
58. “It sounded like a dragon breathing in time with me, like I had this pet dragon who was cuddled up next to me and cared enough about me to time his breaths to mine.” - John Green
59. “I want to minimize the deaths I am responsible for.” - John Green
60. “Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa.” - John Green
61. “I kind of conned you into believing you were falling in love with a healthy person.” - John Green
62. “I pulled the oxygen tubes from my nostrils and raised the tube up over my head, handing it to Dad. I wanted it to be just me and just him.” - John Green
63. “I’ve stopped thinking about it. I don’t have time to have a girlfriend. I have like a full-time job Learning How to Be Blind.” - John Green
64. “He shook his head, just looking at me. - "What?" I asked.- "Nothing" he said.- "Why are you looking at me like that?"Augustus half smiled. "Because you`re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence." A brief awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed through: "I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything."I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then said, "I`m not beau-"- "You are like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie Portman."- "Never seen it."- "Really?" he asked. "Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can`t help but fall for a boy she knows is trouble. It`s your autobiography, so far as I can tell."His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn`t even know that guys could turn me on - not, like, in real life.” - John Green, The Fault In Our Stars
65. “I’m on a side of a road somewhere, stuck in the middle of a very deep hole, with no way of getting out. Never mind how I got in there, it’s not relevant to the story. I’ll invent a back-story… I was walking to get pizza and a chasm opened up in the earth and I fell in, and now I’m at the bottom of this hole, screaming for help. And along comes you. Now, maybe you just keep walking. You know, there’s a strange guy screaming from the center of the Earth. It’s perhaps best to just ignore him. But let’s say that you don’t. Let’s say that you stop. The sensible thing to do in this situation is to call down to me and say “I’m going to look for a ladder. I will be right back.” But you don’t do that. Instead you sit down at the edge of this abyss, and then you push yourself forward, and jump. And when you land at the bottom of the hole and dust yourself off, I’m like “What the hell are you doing?! Now there are two of us in this hole!” And you look at me and say, “Well yeah, but now I’m highly motivated to get you out.” This is what I love about novels, both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are” - John Green
66. “I love you present tense.” - John Green
67. “To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.” - John Green
68. “Spoiler alert. Mayhem lives.” - John Green
69. “Observation: It would be awesome to fly in a superfast airplane that could chase the sunrise around the world for a while.” - John Green
70. “The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness:'I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.” - John Green
71. “He took a long drink, then grimaced. “I do not have a drinking problem,” he announced, his voice needlessly loud. “I have a Churchillian relationship with alcohol: I can crack jokes and govern England and do anything I want to do. Except not drink.” - John Green
72. “I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.” - John Green
73. “I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark.” - John Green
74. “I could remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that 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
75. “The whole thing was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic” - John Green
76. “Sería un honor tener el corazón roto por ti, Hazel Grace.” - John Green
77. “I would argue that stupidity is born out of bad reading, bad teaching and bad thinking!” - John Green
78. “How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?” - John Green
79. “They don't plant in rows because they're idiots,and they don't use farm equipment because they're idiots,and they don't plant in spring because they're idiots..” - John Green
80. “Creo que somos más grandes que la suma de nuestras partes.” - John Green
81. “Te pasas toda la vida atorado en el laberinto, pensando en cómo vas a escapar de ahí un día y que fabuloso será; imaginar ese futuro te mantiene con vida, pero nunca te escapas. Sólo utilizas el futuro para escapar del presente.” - John Green
82. “Cuando los adultos dicen: “Los adolescentes piensan que son invencibles”, con esa sonrisa mañosa y estúpida en sus rostros, no saben cuán en lo correcto están. Necesitamos no perder nunca la esperanza, porque nunca nos podemos romper de manera irreparable. Pensamos que somos invencibles porque los somos. No podemos nacer y no podemos morir. Como toda la energía, sólo podemos cambiar formas, tamaños y manifestaciones. Ellos olvidan eso al envejecer. Temen perder y fracasar. Pero esa parte nuestra, más grande que la suma de nuestras partes, no puede nacer y no puede morir, así que no puede fracasar.” - John Green
83. “You don't give a shit if people like you.” - John Green
84. “You get caught in being something, being cool or special or whatever, to the point where you don’t even know why you need it; you just think you do” - John Green
