86 Ultimate John Green Quotes From The Beloved YA Fiction Writer

Moumita Dutta
Dec 12, 2023 By Moumita Dutta
Originally Published on Feb 13, 2021
Edited by Jacob Fitzbright
John Green
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Age: 0-99
Read time: 12.1 Min

John Michael Green is a best-selling American author who had received worldwide fame after publishing his critically acclaimed novel 'Looking For Alaska' for which he won the Printz Award in 2006.

He is deemed as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century who has received countless awards for his writings. A fan favorite of most young readers, his novels, 'Paper Towns' and 'The Fault In Our Stars' have also been adapted into movies.

Here is a list of some of the best quotes from his life, his teachings to the young generation as well quotes from his acclaimed books, which garnered international recognition. You could also check out funny John Green quotes, and 'Paper Towns' quotes.

If you like our content, you can check out our other articles like 'Looking For Alaska' quotes and 'The Fault In Our Stars' quotes.
 

The Best John Green Quotes

Stack of old books isolated on beige background.

Here is a list of some of the best John Green motivational quotes from books and his life including 'The Fault In Our Stars' book quotes, by Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus, John Green 'Looking for Alaska' quotes as well as John Green love quotes.

1. "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, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

2. "My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations."

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

3. "Some infinities are bigger than other infinities."

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

4. "If people could see me the way I see myself – if they could live in my memories – would anyone love me?"

-John Green, 'An Abundance Of Katherines'.

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

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

6. "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, 'Looking For Alaska'.

7. "I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep."

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'.

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

-John Green, 'An Abundance Of Katherines'.

9. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things."

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

10. "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."

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

11.

"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.'

-John Green, 'The Fault in Our Stars'.

12. "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."

-John Green, 'An Abundance Of Katherines'.

13. "The world is not a wish-granting factory."

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

14. "They don't kill you unless you light them. And I've never lit one. 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. A metaphor."

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

15. "See we may not look like much. Between the three of us, we have five legs, four eyes, two and half working pairs of lungs. But, we also have two dozen eggs so if I were you, I'd go back inside."

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

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

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'.

17. "We are a hot mess!"

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

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

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'.

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

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'.

20. "I fell in love the way you fall asleep. Slowly, then all at once."

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

John Green Quotes About Life

Here is a list of some of the choicest John Green life quotes as well as the best quotes from books.

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

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'.

22. "If the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

23. "That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of."

-John Green, 'An Abundance Of Katherines'.

24. "Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions."

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'.

25. "Here's to all the places we went. And all the places we'll go. And here's to me, whispering again and again and again and again: iloveyou."

-John Green, 'An Abundance Of Katherines'.

26. "You can never love someone as much as you miss them."

-John Green, 'An Abundance Of Katherines'.

27. "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."

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'.

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

-John Green, 'An Abundance Of Katherines'.

29. "He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head."

-John Green, 'An Abundance Of Katherines'.

30. "Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war."

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'

31. "And then there are books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal."

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

32. "He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth."

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'.

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

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

34. "Is it so hard to die, Mr. Lewis? Is that labyrinth really worse than this one?"

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'.

35. "'That's the thing about pain,' Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. 'It demands to be felt.'"

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

36. "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."

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'.

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

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

38. "There's some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what."

-John Green, 'An Abundance Of Katherines'.

39. "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, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

40. "And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart."

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'.

John Green Quotes About Writing And Reading

Are you looking for some of the most heat-soothing John Green inspirational quotes, John Green nerd quotes and John Green book quotes about writing here is a list that might interest you.

41. "I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer."

-John Green.

42. "Language buries, but it does not resurrect."

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

43. "You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them."

-John Green, 'The Fault In Our Stars'.

45. "You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use."

-John Green.

46. "I also like to remind myself of something my dad said in response to writers' block: 'Coal miners don't get coal miners' block."

-John Green.

47. "My interest is in trying to reflect the reality of experience."

-John Green.

48. "Writing is something you do alone."

-John Green.

49. "My interest as a writer is not in reflecting actual human speech, which, of course, does not occur in sentences and is totally undiagrammable."

-John Green.

50. "From 'Twilight' to 'Romeo And Juliet' to 'The Little Mermaid', no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories."

-John Green.

51. "Reading is always an act of empathy. It's always an imagining of what it's like to be someone else."

-John Green.

52. "We're professional worriers. You're constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them."

-John Green.

53. "Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people."

-John Green.

54. "Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people—even imaginary ones—do not live in vacuums."

-John Green.

55. "When I think about characters, I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. "

-John Green.

56. "For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true."

-John Green.

57. "We're all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers."

-John Green.

58. "I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers—where you just repeat what you've already said with phrases like 'In summation', and 'To conclude'."

-John Green, 'Looking For Alaska'.

59. "One of the pitfalls about writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise-beyond-their-years creatures or these sad-eyed tragic people."

-John Green.

60. "Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality."

-John Green.

Quotes By John Green From 'Paper Towns'

John Green has had a major impact on both writers and readers alike. Here is a list of some of the most inspirational John Green books quotes from 'Paper Towns' which also includes John Green funny quotes.

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

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

62. "Maybe all the strings inside him broke."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

63. "Ben, getting you a date to prom is so hard that the American government believes the problem cannot be solved with diplomacy, but will instead require force."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

64. "Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

65. "Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn't the way they actually are."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

66. "The last time I was this scared, I peed myself."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

67. "You can 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, 'Paper Towns'.

68. "I can almost imagine a happiness without her."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

69. "I spy with my little eye a great story."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

70. "The first shall be last; the last shall be first; the meek shall do some earth-inheriting."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

71. "How can you separate those things though? The people are the place is the people."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

72. "And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

73. "Tonight, darling, we are going to right a lot of wrongs. And we are going to wrong some rights."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

74. "I believe in the future. Maybe it's a character flaw, but for me it is a congenital one."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

75. "A Margo for each of us - and each more mirror than window."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

76. "But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

77. "Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is actually used to cut diamonds."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

78. "The thing is that I do believe in college, and jobs, and maybe even babies one day."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

79. "Because if it doesn't happen to you, it doesn't happen at all."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

80. "I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

81. "All along, I kept thinking, I will never do this again, I will never be here again."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

82. "I actually had to face a Dark Lord in order to make the world safe for wizards."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

83. "You're upsetting the black Santas."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

84. "It was a lame string, for sure, but it was the one I had left and every paper girl needs at least one string, right?"

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

85. "By the power of the superglue beer sword, I designate you my driver!"

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

86. "The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle."

-John Green, 'Paper Towns'.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for John Green quotes then why not take a look at 'Turtles All The Way Down' quotes, or 'Paper Towns' quotes?

Main image credit: Debby Wong / Shutterstock.com
 

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Written by Moumita Dutta

Bachelor of Arts specializing in Journalism and Mass Communication, Postgraduate Diploma in Sports Management

Moumita Dutta picture

Moumita DuttaBachelor of Arts specializing in Journalism and Mass Communication, Postgraduate Diploma in Sports Management

A content writer and editor with a passion for sports, Moumita has honed her skills in producing compelling match reports and stories about sporting heroes. She holds a degree in Journalism and Mass Communication from the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management, Calcutta University, alongside a postgraduate diploma in Sports Management.

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