John Quotes

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.

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.

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.

Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will live as one.

The marks humans leave are too often scars.

What a slut time is. She screws everybody.

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

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.

Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.

I finally understood what true love meant...love meant that you care for another person's happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be.

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.

The world is not a wish-granting factory.

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

This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.

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

Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.

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

What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.

Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.

When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..

That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.

I'm in love with you," he said quietly. "Augustus," I said. "I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.

Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.

It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?

I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

What the hell is that?" I laughed. "It's my fox hat." "Your fox hat?" "Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat." "Why are you wearing your fox hat?" I asked. "Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox.

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.

As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.

They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting.

When you're struggling with something, look at all the people around you and realize that every single person you see is struggling with something, and to them, it's just as hard as what you're going through.

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.

The town was paper, but the memories were not.

Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always

They didn’t agree on much. In fact, they didn’t agree on anything. They fought all the time and challenged each other ever day. But despite their differences, they had one important thing in common. They were crazy about each other.

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

I may die young, but at least I'll die smart.

If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!

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

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.

Some people have lives; some people have music.

If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.

That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence

The more I see, the less I know for sure.

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.

Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "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.

I go to seek a Great Perhaps.

There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. 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.

And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity.

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.

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.

Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence

Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

All great and precious things are lonely.

At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

It's amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.

I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever.

You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.

It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.

I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.

One thing you can't hide - is when you're crippled inside.

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.

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.

Don't compromise yourself - you're all you have.

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and 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.

And when her lips met mine, I knew that I could live to be a hundred and visit every country in the world, but nothing would ever compare to that single moment when I first kissed the girl of my dreams and knew that my love would last forever.

because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.

Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.

It's not because I want to make out with her." Hold on." He grabbed a pencil and scrawled excitedly at the paper as if he'd just made a mathematical breakthrough and then looked back up at me. "I just did some calculations, and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit

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?

The saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there's nothing to make it last.

What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.

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.

May I see you again?" he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in his voice. I smiled. "Sure." "Tomorrow?" he asked. "Patience, grasshopper," I counseled. "You don't want to seem overeager. "Right, that's why I said tomorrow," he said. "I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow." I rolled my eyes. "I'm serious," he said. "You don't even know me," I said. I grabbed the book from the center console. "How about I call you when I finish this?" "But you don't even have my phone number," he said. "I strongly suspect you wrote it in this book." He broke out into that goofy smile. "And you say we don't know each other.

There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. 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. God knows that’s what everyone else does.

When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.

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. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal

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.

Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but a Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.

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.

Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future--you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.