John Green Week: Quotations

January 7, 2012 Uncategorized 0

Today I thought I’d highlight some of my very favorite quotations from John Green’s books. I limited myself to four from each book (originally it was three but I just couldn’t parse it down anymore!)
“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting.” 
– John Green –

Looking For Alaska:

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.

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

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.

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. 

An Abundance of Katherines:

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.

What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?

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

What matters to you defines your mattering. 

Paper Towns:

I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.

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

Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.

It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson:

You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot. 

Maybe there’s something you’re afraid to say, or someone you’re afraid to love, or somewhere you’re afraid to go. It’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt because it matters.

When things break, it’s not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It’s because a little piece gets lost – the two remaining ends couldn’t fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.

Tiny Cooper is not the world’s gayest person, and he is not the world’s largest person, but I believe he may be the world’s largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world’s gayest person who is really, really large.

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