John Green

"People die. That’s true in novels, and it’s true in life. Dying is one of the very few things we all do. To deny or ignore the omnipresent reality of death seems to me a disservice to human beings. That said, acknowledging in my novels that death exists does not make me a murderer any more than acknowledging that cancer can be treated makes me an oncologist."

"I may not have facts on my side, Hank, but I still think I'm right. That's the American way."

"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."

"Never go to war with a noun. You will always lose."

"I mean Hank, the movie was great, but the thirty minutes before the movie started was what I love about being a nerd. Because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. We don't have to be like, 'Oh yeah that purse is okay' or like, 'Yeah, I like that band's early 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 are 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'."

"Good morning Hank. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: 'My older brother really needs a haircut!' Well, Hank, I've got one thing to say to that. Never!"

"Now, Hank, obviously you and I are living proof that sometimes a nerd meets another nerd and they fall in nerd-love."

"The Venn Diagram of guys who don't like smart girls and guys you don't want to date is a circle."

"Is health care a privilege, or is it a right? If it's a privilege, even if it's a really desirable privilege like indoor plumbing, we need to stop giving health care of any kind to uninsured people who can't pay for it in advance. But... ...I think the reason we continue to treat people who are uninsured is because we don't believe that health care is a privilege. We believe that it is a right. And if it is a right, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the responsibility of a government to protect that right."

"The fourth way to get a boy to like you is to be yourself. Now, I am contractually obligated as an adult to give that advice, even though it doesn't work. But yeah, be yourself, even though no one has any idea what it means to be yourself. Like whose self would I otherwise be being?"

"'What's the meaning of life?' Other people."

"[Twilight] argues that true love will triumph in the end, which may or may not be true, but if it's a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have."

"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."

"There is no them, there are only facets of us."

"Hank, before I move forward with this discussion, I should acknowledge that as a child I was an inveterate liar... As opposed to now, when I am a novelist."

"The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing it well or you're doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That is actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing."

"So I guess the first thing I would say is: you need to write a story that, unlike my story, has a beginning, a middle and an end. Also the beginning shouldn't involve hating foxes and the end shouldn't involve no one liking you."

"I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer. Because it's the only apprenticeship we have. It's the only way of learning how to write a story."

"When people have to choose between civilization and warm genitals, they choose warm genitals"

"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."

"The test will measure whether you are an informed, engaged and productive citizen of the world, and it will take place in schools and bars and hospitals and dorm-rooms and in places of worship. You will be tested on first dates, in job interviews, while watching football and while scrolling through your Twitter feed. The test will judge your ability to think about things other than celebrity marriages, whether you'll be easily persuaded by empty political rhetoric and whether you'll be able to place your life and your community in a broader context. The test will last your entire life, and it will be comprised of the millions of decisions that, when taken together, make your life yours. And everything - everything - will be on it."

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

"And we'll call you...hmmm. Pudge." "Huh?" "Pudge," the Colonel said. "Because you're skinny. It's called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now, let's go get some cigarettes and start this year off right."

"Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape—the world or the end of it?"

"You can say a lot of things about Alabama, but you can't say that Alabamans as a people are unduly afraid of deep fryers."

"Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die."

"The Colonel ran ahead of me, gleeful at his ejection, and I jogged after him, trailing in his wake. I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails."

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

"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia." "Huh?" I asked. "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."

"She has great breasts," the Colonel said without looking up from the whale. "DO NOT OBJECTIFY WOMEN'S BODIES!" Alaska shouted. Now he looked up. "Sorry. Perky breasts." "That's not any better!"

"God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will."

"I'm just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them."

"How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?"

"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 a hurricane."

"Prick us, we bleed. Prick him, he pops."

"Luck is for suckers."

"'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.'"

"[We] had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth."

"I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart."

"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."

"Thomas Edison's last words were, "It's very beautiful over there." I don't know where there is, but I know it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful."

"But mothers lie. It's in the job description."

"It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he'd ever gotten. And he'd gotten plenty."

"And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus. Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something."

"Missing her kept him awake more than the coffee."

"Colin believed that the world contained exactly two kinds of people: Dumpers and Dumpees. A lot of people will claim to be both, but those people miss the point entirely: You are predisposed to either one fate or the other. Dumpers may not always be the heartbreakers, and the Dumpees may not always be the heartbroken. But everyone has a tendency."

"He just wanted to play robot, for God's sake. Was that so wrong?"

"That smile could end wars and cure cancer."

"Colin did not laugh. Instead he thought, Tampons have strings? Why? Of all the major human mysteries—God, the nature of the universe, etc.—he knew the least about tampons. To Colin, tampons were a little bit like grizzly bears: he was aware of their existence, but he'd never seen one in the wild, and didn't really care to."

"He'd never been all that good at math, but he was a goddamned world-famous expert in getting dumped."