“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“The town was paper, but the memories were not.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future--you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. 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. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“Maybe all the strings inside him broke.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“Maybe its 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. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And its only that time that we see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than Margo Roth Spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me about how it's going with my girlfriend - but I don't give a shit, man, because you're you. My parents have a shit ton of black Santas, but that's okay. They're them. I'm too obsessed with a reference website to answer my phone sometimes when my friends call, or my girlfriend. That's okay, too. That's me. You like me anyway. And I like you. You're funny, and you're smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“As much as life can suck, it always beats the alternative.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the Queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“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.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“And all at once I knew how Margo Roth Spiegelman felt when she wasn't being Margo Roth Spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the unscaleable wall surrounding her. I thought of her asleep on the carpet with only that jagged sliver of sky above her. Maybe Margo felt comfortable there because Margo the person lived like that all the time: in an abandoned room with blocked-out windows, the only light pouring in through holes in the roof. Yes. The fundamental mistake I had always made—and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make—was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“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.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn't planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“Radar threw his books into his locker and shut it. Then the din of conversation around us quieted just a bit as he turned his eyes toward the heavens and shouted, "IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD'S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“It was nice - in the dark and the quiet... and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
John Green
Born place: in Indianapolis, The United States
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“Holy silicone suppository, Batman!” Ethan said, grinning. Dan snorted, Parker coughed to disguise a laugh, and I glared at them all. “What?” My brother shrugged defensively. “That’s what it looks like.”
― Rachel Vincent, quote from Prey
“You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.”
― Jim Butcher, quote from Proven Guilty
“I am no Christian. These days it does no good to confess that, for the bishops and abbots have too much influence and it is easier to pretend to a faith than to fight angry ideas. I was raised a Christian, but at ten years old, when I was taken into Ragnar’s family, I discovered the old Saxon gods who were also the gods of the Danes and of the Norsemen, and their worship has always made more sense to me than bowing down to a god who belongs to a country so far away that I have met no one who has ever been there. Thor and Odin walked our hills, slept in our valleys, loved our women and drank from our streams, and that makes them seem like neighbours. The other thing I like about our gods is that they are not obsessed with us. They have their own squabbles and love affairs and seem to ignore us much of the time, but the Christian god has nothing better to do than to make rules for us. He makes rules, more rules, prohibitions and commandments, and he needs hundreds of black-robed priests and monks to make sure we obey those laws. He strikes me as a very grumpy god, that one, even though his priests are forever claiming that he loves us. I have never been so stupid as to think that Thor or Odin or Hoder loved me, though I hope at times they have thought me worthy of them.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Lords of the North
“People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Heart of the Matter
“I get that you have a huge ego and probably don’t want to admit you’re a disgusting, shallow bastard, but don’t hide behind a doctor’s note.”
― Mimi Jean Pamfiloff, quote from Fugly
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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