John Green
American author of young adult fiction, who has appeared on the New York Times list of bestselling children's chapter books.
"Tiny: You know what's a great metaphor for love?
Me: I have a feeling you're about to tell me...
Tiny: Sleeping beauty... because you have to plow through this incredible thicket of thorns in order to get to beauty, and even then, when you get there, you still have to wake her up."
Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.
I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I've never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero's errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I've ever done.
He'd never been all that good at math, but he was a goddamned world-famous expert in getting dumped.
"But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)"
But mothers lie. It's in the job description.
"That's the thing about pain," Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. "It demands to be felt."
It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he'd ever gotten. And he'd gotten plenty.
"Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die."
"The thing about That Guy Is a Gigolo," Radar says, "I mean, the thing about it as a game, is that in the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined."
[M]aybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we're grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications.
"Being in a relationship, that's something you choose. Being friends, that's just something you are."
Colin believed that the world contained exactly two kinds of people: Dumpers and Dumpees. A lot of people will claim to be both, but those people miss the point entirely: You are predisposed to either one fate or the other. Dumpers may not always be the heartbreakers, and the Dumpees may not always be the heartbroken. But everyone has a tendency.
"She has great breasts," the Colonel said without looking up from the whale.
"DO NOT OBJECTIFY WOMEN'S BODIES!" Alaska shouted.
Now he looked up. "Sorry. Perky breasts."
"That's not any better!"
I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.
He just wanted to play robot, for God's sake. Was that so wrong?
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.
The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing it well or you're doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That is actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.
"How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?"