John Green Quotes

Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.

I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.

The amazing thing is that we’re right to hold onto hope. The world may be broken but hope is not crazy.

It’s just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.

I am still bowled over by this great young adult novel by David Levithan called ‘Every Day,’ which is about a character with no gender or body who wakes up every day in the body of a different person. It’s a really impressive execution of a really great premise.

We all use the future to escape the present.

I don’t decide where I live. My wife decides. She’s a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.

We don’t tend to write about disease in fiction – not just teen novels but all American novels – because it doesn’t fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle.

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

You can’t not like ‘The Great Gatsby.’ It’s got the best sentences in, like, ever.

Grief doesn’t change you. It reveals you.

I always wondered if there was a purpose to the universe, if there was a plan, if there was some sort of organizing factor, hopefully that I played a role in.

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

Videogame players essentially choose whether to win the game or to die heroically. There’s a certain glory in both.