Listen, kid. This is what happens: Somebody-girl usually-got a free spirit, doesn't get on too good with her parents. These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just fly away. And maybe you never see the balloon again. It lands in Canada or somethin', gets work at a restaurant, and before the balloon even notices, it's been pouring coffee in that same dinner to the same sad bastards for thirty years. Or maybe three or four years from now or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home, because it needs money, or it sobered up, or it misses its kid brother. But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time." "Yeah, bu-" "I'm not finished, kid. The thing about these balloons is that there are so goddamned many of them. The sky is choked full of them, rubbing up against one another as they float to here or from there, and every one of those damned balloons ends up on my desk, one way or another, and after awhile a man can get discouraged. Everywhere the balloons, and each of them with a mother and father, or God forbid both, and after a while, you can't even see'em individually. You look up at all the balloons in the sky and you can see all of the balloons, but you cannot see any one balloon.
John Green
Related These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain agains... JOHN GREEN I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ... KELLY JONES She likes to write messages on balloons and send them to the sky. She takes out a black Magic Marker... KENNY PORPORA All the Districts come down and host different activities. We (First District) set up a balloon dart... RICHARD SETO The deaf people there with balloons, holding them up and feeling the vibrations of the balloons to t... JACK BOULWARE Toward the end of February the weather is usually ideal. It's a beautiful time as far as the winds g... FRANK FERRARO It's like making figures out of balloons. You can fill a balloon with air and shape it to be a pretz... TOM STITES I’ve tried so hard to stay away from you,” he whispered one night, cuddling her while the moonli... LISA KLEYPAS Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you... C. JOYBELL C. And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one... RAY BRADBURY Where 'er thou art be thou (w)holy there. MURRAY I. MESZAROS Love is like a balloon.. when you push your relationship with someone forward it is like blowing up ... CRYSTAL SOUTHERLAND I like that hot air balloon.' I pointed to the ceiling where an antique looking wooden hot air ballo... JENNIFER BROWN Pretty much it's the guy and the girl and they each have one friend, and maybe a landlady or somethi... MAGGIE RENZI but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short. JANE AUSTEN When you see a hot-air balloon going by, you immediately turn and look in awe. No matter what you're... FRANK FERRARO And then I realized that love is like a helium balloon. You know the one which flies away into the s... SAPAN SAXENA We have tears in our eyes As we wave our goodbyes, We so loved being with you, we three. ROALD DAHL With the temperatures you get around here (in autumn), the balloon works better than it does right n... DON GRAHAM Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and. GLORIA STEINEM I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just flo... PETE DOCTER You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first ... JULIAN BARNES I kind of get choked up when I see the kids look at the medals. Maybe that will provide them with a ... BRIAN ORSER At some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you'll look back down and ... JOHN GREEN Science is like a flashlight in the hands of people living in a huge balloon. They can illuminate an... HUSTON SMITH People always want to know what it feels like, so I’ll tell you: there’s a sting when you first ... JODI PICOULT We can make balloon arrangements with dozens of balloons. SANDY PRINCE How rarely these few years, as work keeps up aloof, Or fares, or one thing or another, How... VIKRAM SETH 2. Overcommitment and time pressure are the greatest destroyers of marriages. It takes time to devel... JAMES C. DOBSON It's a balloon, not a bubble. Balloons inflate and deflate; bubbles burst. DAVID WLUKA It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you... LAUREN OLIVER Only once in a thousand years or so do we get to hear a Mozart or see a Picasso or read a Shakespear... BILLY CRYSTAL I'm getting real fed up with it. If you go out and lose, hey, you got beat by the best wrestler in t... JAY GROTH I just watched so many Westerns as a kid that you end up using archetypes and sort of tropes of that... GORE VERBINSKI There are still a lot of games to play. It's only half-a-season. A lot of teams struggled in the beg... ALEXEI KOVALEV Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of... JOHN MUIR Planning a surprise party? Make it interesting with different balloon decoration and hire Helium Tan... SMACK AMUSEMENTS I had a chat with May and I had a sweet talk with April but the lovely conversation that left me to ... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH Here is one fact 1 minute to finish the class, 1 day to die, one day behind that fact, one day in th... DEYTH BANGER Gloria watched the swollen white orb of a hot-air balloon rising over Navy Pier and knew she had to ... ANDREA KAYNE KAUFMAN It ends or it doesn't. That’s what you say. That’s how you get through it. The tu... CAITLYN SIEHL We're just young enough where, against good teams like this, if we miss a free throw and they make a... GARY KELLOUGH Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over. RICHARD CARLSON Now is the only time we have, and the only time we have any control over. RICHARD CARLSON Well, the odds must be against anybody being able to fly around the world in a balloon on the first ... RICHARD BRANSON When I see someone interesting on the subway - the lady with her new Bible or the delivery guy holdi... DAVID EBERSHOFF Q: You'er presented with a smooth-faced, eight-foot-high wooden wall. Your objective? Get over it. T... JAMES PATTERSON A hot air balloon requires a great deal of fuel to keep it aloft, so that you can't fly it even ... STEVE FOSSETT I’d take you home with me, see, but two of us in the same Behold? Just wouldn’t work, ends up in... HAL DUNCAN Once the moon gets to be full somebody - some man or other - goes up every day and slices bits of on... RICHARD ADAMS When I've thought about him dying - which admittedly isn't that much - I always thought of it like y... JOHN GREEN You should fight like hell if you get attacked on the street, or in your home. The old thinking was,... CONNIE FLETCHER Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if ... BILL CLEGG We'd start slow, the way we always did, because the run, and the game, could go on for awhile. Maybe... SARAH DESSEN This much I'm certain of: it doesn't happen immediately. You'll finish [the book] and that will be t... MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI All the work that I do, whether or not it ends up being commercially successful or not, feels like t... MICHAEL IAN BLACK A secret is a strange thing. There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone k... MAGGIE STIEFVATER There is really no natural limit to the practice of loving kindness in meditation or in one’s life... JON KABAT-ZINN (I know, it's a poem but oh well). Why! who makes much of a miracle? As to me, I know of ... WALT WHITMAN You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go round the LEO TOLSTOY That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up ... ERNEST CLINE For a man can lose neither the past nor the future; for how can one take from him that which is not ... MARCUS AURELIUS AAaargwannawannaaaagongongonaargggaaaaBLOON!" which is the traditional sound of a very small child l... TERRY PRATCHETT Was that me? Yes it was. Was that him? No it wasn't.. Just a trick of the woods! Just ... STEPHEN SONDHEIM But what I would like to know," says Albert, "is whether there would not have been a war if th... ERICH MARIA REMARQUE But the trouble with sainthood these days is the robe-and-halo imagery that gets stuck onto it." Car... DIANE DUANE You know how you can think you know someone or think you know them but maybe you only know them one ... CARRIE RYAN An author is somebody who writes a story. It doesn't matter if you're a kid or if you're... JARRETT J. KROSOCZKA I want you to send a hundred red balloons up into the sky every Fourth of July and make everyone who... EMALYNNE WILDER One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in som... LEO TOLSTOY The people who run the circus kidnapped us from our parents. Since we got here, we have all been wor... MAGDA M. OLCHAWSKA Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a mil... CHARLIE KAUFMAN God created every man to be free. The ability to choose whether to live free or enslaved, right or w... SUZY KASSEM The truth is you already know what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and s... DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The Type Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else. -Richard Siken SARAH KAY If you were to go [to the Rijksmuseum], and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paint... , THE FAULT IN OUR STARS, 2012 Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in ... ANNE LAMOTT So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, ... NEIL GAIMAN We pay a price for everything we get or take in this world; and although ambitions are well worth ha... L.M. MONTGOMERY Okay, it's like this. You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio.... LIONEL SHRIVER You can blow into a balloon and watch it inflate, and then release it and see it deflate. You can ta... CANDACE ROBINSON But first of all he is a woodsman, and you aren't a woodsman unless you have such a feeling for topo... NORMAN MACLEAN I'll find you, don't worry. My body won't be with you all the time, but you'll always have my heart.... P.C. CAST There are some things that don't change much. I find the smell of a dish, or the way a certain spice... TESSA KIROS The kids know that one got away from us. They now know you can't give up three or four minutes and n... LUANN GRYBOWSKI But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not... JAMES JONES Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or ... AIMEE BENDER Maybe its like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watert... JOHN GREEN Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call, go after her because that’s what y... HARVEY MILK Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call, go after her because that’s what y... HELENA KVARNSTROM Glossa Time goes by, time comes along, All is old and all is new; What is righ... MIHAI EMINESCU If a kid fails a drug test, he's off the team. But even after that happens - he's off the team and o... TONY NICOLINO Forever is a long long time and time has a way of changing things WALT DISNEY COMPANY When we put LIVE backwards it spells EVIL, interesting how one word can have two totally opposing me... GARY F EVANS... I love you." she whispered into the rough wool of his sweater. L.J. SMITH And the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three,... MONTY PYTHON I make mistakes. That's what I do. I speak without thinking, I act without knowing. I d... CANDACE BUSHNELL Directions for Singing 1. Learn these tunes before you learn any others; afterwards learn ... JOHN WESLEY If you participate, you get something, we make sure of that. Every kid gets a shirt and a trophy, or... GEORGE HREHOWESIK Any kid that feels like they don't have any kind of future, whether they're on a street corn... JAMES BROLIN
More John Green
Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories. JOHN GREEN The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real. JOHN GREEN That smile could end wars and cure cancer. JOHN GREEN You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened. JOHN GREEN Well, while you were in the bathroom, I sat down at this picnic table here in Bumblefug, Kentucky, a... JOHN GREEN you can never love someone as much as you miss them. JOHN GREEN There's some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what. JOHN GREEN He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his hea... JOHN GREEN Here's to all the places we went. And all the places we'll go. And here's to me, whispering again an... JOHN GREEN I think it's crazy, crazy that book tours lose so much money. They shouldn't. Book tours sho... JOHN GREEN I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so ha... JOHN GREEN 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... JOHN GREEN I'm sitting her thinking, -God, I swear I will take a vow of silence and move to a monastery and wor... JOHN GREEN Headline?" he asked. "'Swing Set Needs Home,'" I said. "'Desperately Lonely Swing Set Need... JOHN GREEN He called out to his fellow monks,'Come quickly I am tasting stars. JOHN GREEN Is it still cool to go to the mall?' she asked. 'I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what's c... JOHN GREEN Van Houten, I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer... JOHN GREEN Do you have a Wish?' he asked, referring to this organization, The Genie Foundation, which is in the... JOHN GREEN Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I sai... JOHN GREEN I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up," he said. "And it is my privilege and my resp... JOHN GREEN You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurt... JOHN GREEN Tell me my copy is missing the last twenty pages or something. Hazel Grace, tell me I hav... JOHN GREEN What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is s... JOHN GREEN I'm starting to think you have an amputee fetish" he answered, still kissing me. I laughed. "I... JOHN GREEN I have an Augustus Waters fetish," I explained. JOHN GREEN Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the St... JOHN GREEN Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end ... JOHN GREEN Lonley, Vaguely pedophilic swing set seeks the butts of children. JOHN GREEN There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection o... JOHN GREEN He’s not that smart.” “She’s right,” Augustus says. “It’s just that most re... JOHN GREEN All at once, I couldn’t figure out why I was methodically tossing a spherical object through a tor... JOHN GREEN A day after I got my eye cut out, Gus showed up at the hospital. I was blind and heart-broken and di... JOHN GREEN I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasu... JOHN GREEN Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. W... JOHN GREEN Maybe 'Okay' will be our 'always'... JOHN GREEN I was a bit of a Victorian Lady, fainting-wise. JOHN GREEN While I did not fancy myself a particularly good person, I never thought my first real sexual action... JOHN GREEN the world wasn't made for us, we were made for the world JOHN GREEN Mom sobbed something into Dad's chest that I wish I hadn't heard, and that I hope she never finds ou... JOHN GREEN I fell in love like you would fall asleep: slowly and then all at once. JOHN GREEN I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I'd never grow old with August... JOHN GREEN Come over here so I can examine your face with my hands and see deeper into your soul than a sighted... JOHN GREEN Gus: "It tastes like..." Me: "Food." Gus: "Yes, precisely. It tastes like food, excellentl... JOHN GREEN But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassiu... JOHN GREEN I imagined the Augustus Waters analysis of that comment: If I am playing basketball in heaven, does ... JOHN GREEN I love you present tense. JOHN GREEN She loved mysteries so much, that she became one. 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... JOHN GREEN There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the ... JOHN GREEN As the tide washed in, the Dutch Tulip Man faced the Ocean: "Conjoiner rejoinder poisoner conce... JOHN GREEN And then the line was quite but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in... JOHN GREEN All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute th... JOHN GREEN There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came. His voice was ... JOHN GREEN I know so many last words. But I will never know hers. JOHN GREEN And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn't planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure ... JOHN GREEN Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an... JOHN GREEN That's why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates a adjecti... JOHN GREEN I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is ine... JOHN GREEN I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevole... JOHN GREEN Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that i... JOHN GREEN If people could see me the way I see myself - if they could live in my memories - would anyone love ... 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 I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was t... JOHN GREEN there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars JOHN GREEN I dislike the phrase 'Internet friends,' because it implies that people you know online aren't reall... JOHN GREEN I wish I knew how to quit you, Tumblr. JOHN GREEN Just move to the Internet, its great here. We get to live inside where the weather is always awesome... JOHN GREEN Oh, Wikipedia, with your tension between those who would share knowledge and those who would destroy... JOHN GREEN It's not because I want to make out with her." Hold on." He grabbed a pencil and scrawled excit... JOHN GREEN I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying tr... JOHN GREEN They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting. JOHN GREEN Principled hate is a hell of a lot stronger than "Boy, I wish you hadn't mummified me and thrown me ... JOHN GREEN Some people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said. "R... JOHN GREEN So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I w... JOHN GREEN Thomas Edison's last words were "It's very beautiful over there ". I don't know where there is... JOHN GREEN Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you. JOHN GREEN When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, t... JOHN GREEN What a slut time is. She screws everybody. JOHN GREEN The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. JOHN GREEN Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than... JOHN GREEN You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I... JOHN GREEN Some people have lives; some people have music. JOHN GREEN You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect. JOHN GREEN As Alaska zipped through something obvious about linear equations, stoner/baller Hank Walsten said, ... JOHN GREEN Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to t... JOHN GREEN Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinc... JOHN GREEN Some infinities are bigger than other infinities... JOHN GREEN It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities ar... JOHN GREEN There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection o... JOHN GREEN Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. JOHN GREEN What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person. JOHN GREEN Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about sufferi... JOHN GREEN You could hold me and I could hold you. And it would be so peaceful. Completely peaceful. Like the f... JOHN GREEN That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pret... JOHN GREEN The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember w... JOHN GREEN Apparently, the world is not a wish-granting factory. JOHN GREEN Augustus," I said. "Really. You don't have to do this." "Sure I do," he said. "I found my Wish.... JOHN GREEN Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start. JOHN GREEN You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are. JOHN GREEN We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska t... JOHN GREEN Harry Potter isn’t real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am ... JOHN GREEN The marks humans leave are too often scars. JOHN GREEN As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once. JOHN GREEN Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew wha... JOHN GREEN It's just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations.' 'Right, i... JOHN GREEN Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinc... JOHN GREEN Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to den... JOHN GREEN I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, ok... JOHN GREEN You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you. All effo... JOHN GREEN That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in t... JOHN GREEN I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the con... JOHN GREEN Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always JOHN GREEN It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the ... JOHN GREEN Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom... JOHN GREEN Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal. JOHN GREEN Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he h... JOHN GREEN May I see you again?" he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in his voice. I smile... JOHN GREEN There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no ... JOHN GREEN Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you. JOHN GREEN The world is not a wish-granting factory. JOHN GREEN My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations. JOHN GREEN Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, an... JOHN GREEN Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but ... JOHN GREEN You will not kill my girlfriend today, International Terrorists of Ambiguous Nationality! JOHN GREEN I mean, we're ninjas." "Well maybe you're a ninja," I said "You're just... JOHN GREEN The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exa... JOHN GREEN There are times when it is appropriate, even preferable, to get an erection when someone's face is i... JOHN GREEN We were kissing. I thought: This is good. I thought: I am not bad at this kissing. Not bad... JOHN GREEN What the hell is that?" I laughed. "It's my fox hat." "Your fox hat?" "Yeah, Pudge. M... JOHN GREEN I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their in... JOHN GREEN Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die. JOHN GREEN We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken. JOHN GREEN It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.... JOHN GREEN Sometimes I don't get you,' I said. She didn't even glance at me. She just smiled toward the t... JOHN GREEN That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them. JOHN GREEN I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassi... JOHN GREEN I just did some calculations and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit. JOHN GREEN I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to us... JOHN GREEN Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war JOHN GREEN And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall... JOHN GREEN Have you really read all those books in your room?” Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’... JOHN GREEN He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, a... JOHN GREEN Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why... JOHN GREEN It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and fe... JOHN GREEN I may die young, but at least I'll die smart. JOHN GREEN What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those ... JOHN GREEN I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fu... JOHN GREEN When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books. JOHN GREEN pg. 231-232: They'd given me a minivan. They could have picked any car and they picked a minivan. A ... JOHN GREEN Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, cert... JOHN GREEN I figured something out. The future is unpredictable. JOHN GREEN When things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again.... JOHN GREEN It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world. JOHN GREEN Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth,... JOHN GREEN [I]t occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, beca... JOHN GREEN Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will… but then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing eve... JOHN GREEN What the hell is instant ? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant puddin... 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 w... JOHN GREEN You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how ... JOHN GREEN You used," he said, and then took a sharp breath, "to call me Augustus. JOHN GREEN The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, o... JOHN GREEN It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else. JOHN GREEN I'm in love with you," he said quietly. "Augustus," I said. "I am," he said. H... JOHN GREEN I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they ... JOHN GREEN And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. JOHN GREEN -so if the inevitability of oblivion worries you, than I suggest you ignore it. God knows that's wha... JOHN GREEN Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting. JOHN GREEN You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them. JOHN GREEN What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? JOHN GREEN Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the sid... JOHN GREEN What's that?" "The laundry basket?" "No, next to it." "I don't see anything next to i... JOHN GREEN Do the thing you're good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something. JOHN GREEN For a moment, she was quiet. Then she grabbed my hand, whispered, “Run run run run run,” and too... JOHN GREEN We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels -... JOHN GREEN I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not tru... JOHN GREEN Chuck Parson did not participate in organized sports, because to do so would distract from his large... JOHN GREEN The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tighteni... JOHN GREEN Anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see. JOHN GREEN You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. JOHN GREEN But there was so much todo: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I'll have more tim... JOHN GREEN How wil we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? JOHN GREEN AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!' he screamed. 'So that's Sara,' I said. 'Yes.' 'She seems nice. JOHN GREEN The pigs can't stop the fox; I'm too quick,' Takumi said to himself. "I can rhyme while I run; I'm t... JOHN GREEN I’m just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them. JOHN GREEN You can't just make me different and then leave JOHN GREEN She has great breasts," the Colonel said without looking up from the whale. "DO NOT OBJECTIFY W... JOHN GREEN But why Alaska?' I asked her. 'Well, later, I found out what it means. It's from an Aleut... JOHN GREEN Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better th... JOHN GREEN I'm really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what. JOHN GREEN You're funny, and you're smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually. JOHN GREEN I have a great affection for people who are intellectually engaged with the world, and who don’t t... JOHN GREEN I've never known before what it feels like to want someone - not to want to hook up with them or wha... JOHN GREEN There's a stark difference between the words 'prodigy' and 'genius.' Prodigies can very quickly lear... JOHN GREEN Why is being a nerd bad? Saying I notice you’re a nerd is like saying, ‘Hey, I notice that you�... JOHN GREEN I wanted us to have an adventure. Because I love that crap. Because I'm not whatever-her-name-is. I ... JOHN GREEN If my public existence does anything worthwhile, hopefully it at least demystifies the author a bit,... JOHN GREEN If people were like rain, I was like drizzle and she was a hurricane. JOHN GREEN I do not say goodbye. I believe that's one of the bullshitiest words ever invented. It's not like yo... JOHN GREEN Do you know what your problem is? You can't live with the idea that someone might leave. JOHN GREEN Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will JOHN GREEN