John Green’s books have been a companion in loneliness, misery, and sorrow for many years now. I turn to them when I need a break from existing, when I need an escape. His words have held me tight through late-night anxieties, heartbreaks that I thought I wouldn’t survive, and those strange in-between moments when life feels both impossibly fragile and incredibly beautiful.
More than his plots and characters, it’s the way he weaves sentences. Tender. Truthful. Transcendent. As if life is reaching for something beyond the edges of mundanity. This collection of the 100 best John Green quotes have stayed with me when everyone left. If you are meeting his words for the first time, welcome. You are going to love being a fan of his work. He never disappoints his reader.
If you are returning, you already know the door is always open. Either way, I hope these lines calm you and take your breath away at the same time.
Quotes From Looking for Alaska
- “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.”
- “I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can’t due to deadness.”
- “When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.”
- “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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 may die young, but at least I’ll die smart.”
- “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.”
- “Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.”
- “That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.”
- “It’s not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That’s the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?”
- “People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.”
- “I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.”
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Quotes From The Fault in Our Stars
- “Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
- “Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”
- “Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”
- “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
- “The world is not a wish-granting factory.”
- “The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
- “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.”
- “As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”
- “You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”
- “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.”
- “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.”
- “But I believe in true love, you know? 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.”
- “You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.”
- “There is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars”
- “What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. 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.”
- “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.”
- “And I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, ‘This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.”
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Quotes From Paper Towns
- “It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
- “The town was paper, but the memories were not.”
- “What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
- “It was nice – in the dark and the quiet… and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing.”
- “Maybe all the strings inside him broke.”
- “Maybe it’s like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen – these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack in places. And I mean, yeah once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable.”
- “I’m starting to realize that people lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, & so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.”
- “At some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too.”
- “Poetry is just so emo.” he said. “Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.”
- “Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are… People are different when you can smell them and see them up close…”
- “A paper town for a paper girl.”
- “This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.”
- “Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside someone else…But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.”
- “The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.”
- What about the rest of your life?” She shrugged. “What about it?” “Aren’t you worried about, like, forever?” “Forever is composed of nows,” she says.
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Quotes From Everything Is Tuberculosis
- “But as a friend once told me, “Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”
- “We live in between what we choose and what is chosen for us.”
- “We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.”
- “We live in between what we choose and what is chosen for us.”
- “People who are treated as less than fully human by the social order are more susceptible to tuberculosis but it’s not because of their moral codes or choices or genetics, it’s because they are treated as less than fully human by the social order.”
- “We can do and be so much for each other—but only when we see one another in our full humanity, not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.”
- “How can I accept a world where over a million people will die this year for want of a cure that has existed for nearly a century?”
- “What’s different now from 1804 or 1904 is that tuberculosis is curable, and has been since the mid-1950s. We know how to live in a world without tuberculosis. But we choose not to live in that world.”
- “Death is natural. Children dying is natural. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.”
- “The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share. For me at least, the history and present of tuberculosis reveal the folly and brilliance and cruelty and compassion of humans.”
- “Education is the most important thing,” he told me once. “Not just for me, you know, but also for the nation.”
- “A world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause.”
- “The world is inherently more complex than the narratives we impose upon it.”
- “The beauty of women is greatly owing to their delicacy, or weakness.” One romantic word to describe the beauty standard—delicacy—followed by a stigmatizing one—weakness.”
- “Some people became so hungry, she told me, that they left the hospital and stopped taking their medication, which increased the likelihood that the TB bacteria within them would continue multiplying, eventually developing resistance to first-line treatments. But they simply could not live with the hunger.”
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Quotes From Turtles All the Way Down
- “You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.”
- “Your now is not your forever.”
- “There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.”
- “You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.”
- “The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.”
- “The problem with happy endings is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.”
- “I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.”
- “It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.”
- “You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.”
- “I is the hardest word to define.”
- “Our hearts were broken in the same places. That’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.”
- “If only I were as good at life as I am at the internet.”
- “Break hearts, not promises.”
- “Every loss is unprecedented. You can’t ever know someone else’s hurt, not really—just like touching someone else’s body isn’t the same as having someone else’s body.”
- “Life is a series of choices between wonders.”
- “Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.”
- “I couldn’t make myself happy, but I could make people around me miserable.”
- “Thoughts are only thoughts.They are not you, you belong to yourself even when your thoughts don’t.”
- “You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas.”
- “You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.”
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Quotes From The Anthropocene Reviewed
- “To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
- “For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.”
- “In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”
- “We can talk and talk and talk about what the pain is like, but we can never manage to convey what it is.”
- “Maybe we forget so that we can go on.”
- “I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive.”
- “I’m not sure why I find it beautiful to devote oneself obsessively to the creation of something that doesn’t matter, but I do.”
- “What an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth.”
- “I am thoughtful– full of thoughts, all the time, inescapably, exhaustingly.”
- “Like an expensive painting or a fragile orchid, I thrive only in extremely specific conditions.”
- “Art is where what we survive survives.”
- “Never predict the end of the world. You’re almost certain to be wrong, and if you’re right, no one will be around to congratulate you.”
- “Depression is exhausting. It gets old so fast, listening to the elaborate prose of your brain tell you that you’re an idiot for even trying.”
- “He showed me that you could be crazy and still be human, still be valuable, and still be loved.”
- “Heartbreak is not really so different from falling in love. Both are overwhelming experiences that unmoor me. Both burst with yearning. Both consume the self.”
The best John Green quotes are like tiny flashes of insight on love, life, language, kindness, and what it’s like to live in this world. Whether these lines meet you in a season of sadness, in a chapter of change, or simply on an ordinary afternoon where you are sipping your coffee and enjoying the company of your loved one, I hope they continue to echo in ways that matter.
And if nothing else, may they remind you of this: stories stay with us not because they are perfect, but because they teach us to pay attention, to the world, to each other, and to ourselves.
