50 Best John Green Quotes About Love, Life And Loss
A deeper look into John Green's perspective.
Debby Wong / Shutterstock When I read my first John Green novel, I automatically found him to be so profound. Maybe it was because I was a pre-teen who loved anything young adult fiction or that I had minimal to no experience in life. It could have even bee the simplicity of his writing.
Either way, he had a way with words, and the collection of John Green quotes below from his most popular novels are proof. Green is a best selling American author known for his novels The Fault In Our Stars, Paper Towns, and Looking For Alaska.
John Green's novels have been adapted into films and shows, and it’s not surprising his work translates well onscreen. He paints a picture in the reader’s mind and gives it a new meaning to words and phrases.
For example, when I don’t have anything to say, I say just that. Green, on the other hand, uses colorful language. A quote that’s representative of that is when he writes "My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.” All that fancy phrase means is that I can’t put my thought together. Genius right?
Believe it or not, in middle school I would work John Green quotes into my conversations because I thought it made me sound smart. Surprisingly it really did.
We all know that knowledge is power and that reading books will get you far in life, but those cliches are true. The more you read the more you know. Green’s novels aren’t politically charged or academic, but I still learned something and grew from reading them.
Reading Green’s work subtly altered my perspective on what actually mattered. He made me appreciate the small infinities we get in life. His unapologetic approach to life and death, somehow made the concept less heartbreaking, and more like a fact of life.
If you are ready for a personal transformation, check out these profound John Green quotes about love, life and loss:
1. “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.”
2. “As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
3. “It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
4. “My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.”
5. “What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
6. “Those awful things are survivable because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.”
4. “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.”
5. “If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”
6. "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.”
7. “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.”
8. “What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
9. "You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened."
10. “I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.”
11. “At some point, you just pull off the band-aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.”
12. “It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.”
13. “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
14. “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
15. “Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.”
16. "That's the thing about pain, it demands to be felt."
17. “Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting."
18. "The world may be broken, but hope is not crazy."
19. “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.”
20. “You can love someone so much... But you can never love someone as much as you miss them.”
21. “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.”
22. “You are helpful, and you are loved, and you are forgiven, and you are not alone.”
23. “Every year, many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you.”
24. "I can't tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity."
25. “I think inspiration is always around; it's just a question of whether or not you're noticing it."
26. “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.”
27. "Maybe okay will be our always."
28. “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.”
29. “We all use the future to escape the present.”
30. “The world is not a wish-granting factory.”
31. “Life works best when we think of people as people.”
32. “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.”
33. “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.”
34. “There are some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.”
35. "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.”
36. “You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”
37. “I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.”
38. “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.”
39. “I'm a grenade and at some point, I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”
40. "You like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot."
41. “...whatever you're worried about, you're bigger than the worries.”
42. “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.”
43. “The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful, and should be used sparingly.”
44. “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.”
45. “I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.”
46. "Don’t make stuff because you want to make money - it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous - because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people - and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts."
47. "Our lives are composed of a finite set of moments that we choose how to spend."
48. "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.”
49. "Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon."
50. “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.”
Tamara Sanon is a writer with a passion for covering topics about health and wellness, lifestyle, astrology, and relationships.