127 John Green Quotes to Change How You See Life

1. “Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.” – John Green

2. “Disease only treats humans equally when our social orders treat humans equally.” – John Green

3. “That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.” – John Green

4. “I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.” – John Green

5. “There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1.” – John Green

6. “Do you know what your problem is? You can’t live with the idea that someone might leave.” – John Green

7. “As long as we don’t die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.” – John Green

8. “I can’t tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity.” – John Green

9. “I must choose to believe, to care, to hold dear. I keep going. I go to therapy. I try a different medication. I meditate, even though I despise meditation. I exercise. I wait. I work to believe, to hold dear, to go on.” – John Green

10. “As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” – John Green

11. “I spy with my little eye a great story.” – John Green

12. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.” – John Green

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

14. “Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.” – John Green

15. “There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.” – John Green

16. “Thoughts are just a different kind of bacteria, colonizing you. I thought about the gut-brain information axis. Maybe you’re already gone. The prisoners run the jail now. Not a person so much as a swarm. Not a bee, but the hive.” – John Green

17. “This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.” – John Green

18. “I write about broken people who need other people in order to go on. But those are the only kind of people I know to exist. We are all broken.” – John Green

19. “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.” – John Green

20. “I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity.” – John Green

21. “Stupid human voices always ruining everything.” – John Green

22. “It seemed like forever ago, like we’ve had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.” – John Green

23. “Hope is the correct response to the strange, often terrifying miracle of consciousness. Hope is not easy or cheap. It is true.” – John Green

24. “You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.” – John Green

25. “I think inspiration is always around; it’s just a question of whether or not you’re noticing it.” – John Green

26. “I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible for me.” – John Green

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

28. “That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.” – John Green

29. “Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.” – John Green

30. “It is so hard to leave – until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.” – John Green

31. “You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.” – John Green

32. “Reading forces you to be quiet in a world that no longer makes place for that.” – John Green

33. “I’m so proud of you that it makes me proud of me. I hope you know that.” – John Green

34. “Imagine others complexly.” – John Green

35. “Suffering is universal.” – John Green

36. “You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.” – John Green

37. “You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.” – John Green

38. “She loved mysteries so much that she became one.” – John Green

39. “Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? But I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself – if they could live in my memories – would anyone, anyone, love me?” – John Green

40. “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

41. “There’s some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.” – John Green

42. “Your now is not your forever.” – John Green

43. “The marks humans leave are too often scars.” – John Green

44. “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” – John Green

45. “My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.” – John Green

46. “We are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.” – John Green

47. “If people were like rain, I was like drizzle and she was a hurricane.” – John Green

48. “Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.” – John Green

49. “Maybe okay will be our always.” – John Green

50. “I just want to fly under the radar, because when you start to make yourself into a big deal, that’s when you get shot down.” – John Green

51. “I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.” – John Green

52. “That’s the thing about pain, it demands to be felt.” – John Green

53. “Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.” – John Green

54. “True love will triumph in the end – which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, it’s the most beautiful lie we have.” – John Green

55. “Everyone was so kind. Strong, too. In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life.” – John Green

56. “Because you’re only thinking they-might-not-like-me-they-might-not-like-me, and guess what? When you act like that, no one likes you.” – John Green

57. “But I believe in true love, you know? I don’t believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.” – John Green

58. “…whatever you’re worried about, you’re bigger than the worries.” – John Green

59. “At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.” – John Green

60. “It’s bad for your brain not to unplug.” – John Green

61. “Despair isn’t very productive. That’s the problem with it. Like a replicating virus, all despair can make is more of itself.” – John Green

62. “My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life.” – John Green

63. “I still sometimes stop hearing the tune. I still become enveloped by the abject pain of hopelessness. But hope is singing all the while. It’s just that again and again, I must relearn how to listen.” – John Green

64. “The pure and simple truth Is rarely pure and never simple. What’s a boy to do When lies and truth are both sinful?” – John Green

65. “We all use the future to escape the present.” – John Green

66. “What a slut time is. She screws everybody.” – John Green

67. “But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” – John Green

68. “YOU are valuable and rare and worthy of love.” – John Green

69. “Love is keeping the promise anyway.” – John Green

70. “Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting.” – John Green

71. “Read a lot. Read broadly… Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored… Write a lot.” – John Green

72. “Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.” – John Green

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

74. “We’re professional worriers. You’re constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them.” – John Green

75. “The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.” – John Green

76. “You say you’re not special because the world doesn’t know about you, but that’s an insult to me. I know about you.” – John Green

77. “I go to seek a Great Perhaps. That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.”” – John Green

78. “So keeping the box closed just keeps you in the dark, not the universe.” – John Green

79. “Maybe there’s something you’re afraid to say or someone you’re afraid to love, or somewhere you’re afraid to go. It’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt because it matters.” – John Green

80. “I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.” – John Green

81. “We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.” – John Green

82. “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

83. “When you acknowledge that there is nothing repulsive or unforgivable or shameful about yourself, it becomes easier to be that authentic person and feel like you’re living a less performed life.” – John Green

84. “You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lesson my affections for you.” – John Green

85. “At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.” – John Green

86. “To be alive is to be missing.” – John Green

87. “If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.” – John Green

88. “You will go to the paper towns and never come back.” – John Green

89. “no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again. aa” – John Green

90. “The problem with happy endings, I said, is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.” – John Green

91. “Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.” – John Green

92. “Some people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said. “Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.” – John Green

93. “You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.” – John Green

94. “When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you’re just kidding.” – John Green

95. “I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.” – John Green

96. ″‘Doing stuff never feels as good as you hope it will feel.‘” – John Green

97. “I am very glad I lived through some hard days, so that I could have this one.” – John Green

98. “It is very sad to me that some people are so intent on leaving their mark on the world that they don’t care if that mark is a scar.” – John Green

99. “The world may be broken, but hope is not crazy.” – John Green

100. “Maybe all the strings inside him broke.” – John Green

101. “What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.” – John Green

102. “You can love someone so much…But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.” – John Green

103. “I don’t know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.” – John Green

104. “There are some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.” – John Green

105. “You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.” – John Green

106. “Writing is something you do alone. It’s a profession for introverts who wanna tell you a story but don’t wanna make eye contact while telling it.” – John Green

107. “Some people have lives; some people have music.” – John Green

108. ″‘As long as we don’t die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.‘” – John Green

109. “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

110. “What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?” – John Green

111. “That smile could end wars and cure cancer.” – John Green

112. “We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them.” – John Green

113. “The world is not a wish-granting factory.” – John Green

114. “You are helpful, and you are loved, and you are forgiven, and you are not alone.” – John Green

115. “I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward 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

116. “The world is what it is. But the world is also what you bring to it, and who you share it with.” – John Green

117. “You can’t see the future coming — not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.” – John Green

118. “But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all the other thoughts until it’s the only one you’re able to have, the thought you’re perpetually either thinking or distracting yourself from.” – John Green

119. “March 4th, the only day that is also a sentence.” – John Green

120. “I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.” – John Green

121. “We are never far from wonders.” – John Green

122. “But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about. Does that make sense?” – John Green

123. “Even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.” – John Green

124. “The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle … I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman” – John Green

125. “We didn’t talk much. But we didn’t need to.” – John Green

126. “Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die.” – John Green

127. “A desert blessing, an ocean curse.” – John Green

Must Read

Related Articles