John Michael Green is an American author and YouTube content creator. He won the 2006 Printz Award for his debut novel, Looking for Alaska, and his fourth solo novel, The Fault in Our Stars, debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list in January 2012. Profoundly inspirational John Green quotes will make you look at life differently and help you live a meaningful life.
If you’re searching for meaningful quotes by authors that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of quotes by J.R.R Tolkien, best Kurt Vonnegut quotes and greatest Leo Tolstoy quotes.
Famous John Green Quotes
This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again. – John Green
The nature of impending fatherhood is that you are doing something that you’re unqualified to do, and then you become qualified while doing it. – John Green
I try to live life so that I can live with myself. – John Green
Just a word of advice. Whenever you’re furious with your parents or you think they’re terrible, just remember, you vomited on them and they kept you. – John Green
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
We all use the future to escape the present. – John Green
Always’ was a promise! How can you just break the promise? Sometimes people don’t always understand the promises they’re making when they make them, I said. Isaac shot me a look. Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love? I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it. – John Green
You can love someone so much…But you can never love people as much as you can miss them. – John Green
My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations. – John Green
To be human is to catch the falling person. – John Green
I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him – that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he’d once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter. – John Green
One of the Great Rules of Economics According to John Green If you are rich, you have to be an idiot not to stay rich. And if you are poor, you have to be really smart to get rich. – John Green
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. – John Green
It seemed like forever ago, like we’ve had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. – John Green
We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. – John Green
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
Every year, many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you. – John Green
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. – John Green
And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don’t just make us matter to each other – maybe they’re also the only way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long. – John Green
I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful. – John Green
You can trust that caring, as a rule, ends poorly, which is true. Caring doesn’t sometimes lead to misery. It always does. – John Green
The world may be broken, but hope is not crazy. – John Green
Whenever I’m asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you’re being told. – John Green
I still think that maybe the afterlife is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe we are just matter, and matter gets recycled – John Green
We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken. – John Green
Imagine others complexly. – John Green
If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all. – John Green
It’s more impressive, I said out loud. From a distance, I mean. You can’t see the wear on things, you know? You can’t see the rust or the weeds or the paint cracking. You see the place as someone once imagined it. – John Green
Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood. – John Green
What matters to you defines your mattering. – John Green
I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, I want to go too! I want to go too! And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: We are all going. – John Green
I’m so proud of you that it makes me proud of me. I hope you know that. – John Green
People thought he was a glutton for punishment, that he liked getting dumped. But it wasn’t like that. He could just never see anything coming, and as he lay on the solid, uneven ground with Hassan pressing too hard on his forehead, Colin Singleton’s distance from his glasses made him realize the problem: myopia. He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible. – John Green
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once. – John Green
Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that’s true whether you’re reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It’s always an imagining of what it’s like to be someone else. – John Green
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. – John Green
I’ll fight it. I’ll fight it for you. Don’t you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I’m okay. I’ll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time. – John Green
If people were like rain, I was like drizzle and she was a hurricane. – John Green
You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are. – John Green
You’re funny, and you’re smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually. – John Green
You listen to people so that 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. – John Green
Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center. – John Green
When we read the right book generously, it can change the way think about the world around us. – John Green
Being in a relationship, that’s something you choose. Being friends, that’s something you just are. – John Green
I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you. – John Green
I opened the door. He looked down at my shirt and smiled. Funny, he said. Don’t call my boobs funny, I answered. – John Green
Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart. – John Green
If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I’d be crazier than a shithouse rat. – John Green
There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough. – John Green
The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness. – John Green
The worse the haircut, the better the man. – John Green
I don’t know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you’re brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr. – John Green
So we gave up. I’d finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be seen. We’d failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved. – John Green
I wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for independent bookstores. – John Green
Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal. – John Green
March 4th, the only day that is also a sentence – John Green
No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can’t go all the way around. – John Green
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
One day, you’re 17 and you’re planning for someday. And then quietly, without you ever really noticing, someday is today. And then someday is yesterday. And this is your life. – John Green
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
Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortable as possible? What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of the universe, this line of inquiry inevitably reduces us to asking what it means to be human and whether—to borrow a phrase from the angst-encumbered sixteeen-year-olds you no doubt revile—there is a point to it all. – John Green
So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that’s not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered. I have found this very useful to think about over the years, and I find that it is a lot easier and more bearable to be sad when you aren’t constantly berating yourself for being sad. – John Green
We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we’d learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did. – John Green
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 our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. – John Green
What’s the meaning of life? Other people. – John Green
There’s some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what. – John Green
The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before. – John Green
One of those moments he knew he’d remember and look back on, one of those moments that he’d try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering. – John Green
Maybe all the strings inside him broke. – John Green
She had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with your own. – John Green
She was not an adventure; she was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl. – John Green
Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you. – John Green
The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank’s name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. FOUR. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around. – John Green
It’s hard to believe in coincidence, but it’s even harder to believe in anything else. – John Green
I was born into Bolívar’s labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais’ Great Perhaps. – John Green
She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. – John Green
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
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
I’m a bad boyfriend. She’s a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other. – John Green
Beware of that monster called ‘self-loathing’. – John Green
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
As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist. – John Green
Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should. I’d hoped that he’d be eulogizing me. – John Green
You can’t just make me different, and then leave. Because I was fine before, Alaska. I was just fine with me and last words and school friends, and you can’t just make me different and then die. – John Green
Without pain, how could we know joy?’ This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate. – John Green
Crying is you, plus tears. – John Green
Gratitude is the proper response for the absolute astonishment of getting to be alive, and aware, and an essential part of this crazy, sprawling story. – John Green
Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin. – John Green
I don’t think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing. – John Green
What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers. – John Green
What I eventually realized is that the real business of books is not done by awards committees or people who turn trees into paper or editors or agents or even writers. We’re all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers. – John Green
You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful. – John Green
I hated hurting him. Most of the time, I could forget about it, but the inexorable truth is this: They might be glad to have me around, but I was the alpha and the omega of my parents’ suffering. – John Green
So, here’s my advice: Study broadly and without fear. Learn a language if you can, because that will make your life more interesting. Read a little bit every day. But more importantly, surround yourself with people who you like and make cool stuff with them. In the end, what you do isn’t going to be nearly as interesting or important as who you do it with. – John Green
Love is keeping the promise anyway. – John Green
And yet still I worried. I like being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying. – John Green
I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving. – John Green
There’s a stark difference between the words ‘prodigy’ and ‘genius.’ Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn; geniuses do. – John Green
Dating you would be like a series of unnecessary root canals interspersed with occasional makeout sessions. – John Green
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. – John Green
She loved mysteries so much that she became one. – John Green
I love being in cities with lots of other people, because I’m reminded that there are billions of people like me, and we are each stuck inside of our minds, feverishly trying to crawl out to make connections with other people. – John Green
I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark. – John Green
It’s just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much. – John Green
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
You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose. – John Green
I ran like a cheetah – well, like a cheetah that smoked too much. – John Green
You are helpful, and you are loved, and you are forgiven, and you are not alone. – John Green
Home is Where the Heart Is, Good Friends Are Hard to Find and Impossible to Forget. True Love is Born from Hard Times. – John Green
And I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart slowly, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and nothing but herself and her mom in those last moments as she spent as a person. – John Green
I am a grenade, I said again. I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there’s nothing I can do about hurting you: You’re too invested, so just please let me do that, okay? I’m going to go to my room and read for awhile, okay? I’m fine. I really am fine: I just want to go read for a while. – John Green
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death. – John Green
The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more. – John Green
I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose. – John Green
Writing does not resurrect. It buries. – John Green
Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will, she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. Yeah, that’s true, I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, But then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all. – John Green
Not that smart. Not that hot. Not that nice. Not that funny. That’s me: I’m not that. – John Green
I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering. – John Green
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect. – John Green
I think inspiration is always around; it’s just a question of whether or not you’re noticing it. – John Green
Night falls fast. Today is the past. – John Green
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
