"I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back."
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John Green quotes (page 21 of 69)
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"Crying is you, plus tears"
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"What's the meaning of life? Other people."
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"I told myself – as I’ve told myself before – that the body shuts down when the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn’t slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown."
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"Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told."
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"We're all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers."
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"Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?" "Sometimes people don't always understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said. Isaac shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?" I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it."
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"Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."
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"Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but a Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile."
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"You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to."
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"dating you would be like a series of unnecessary root canals interspersed with occasional makeout sessions."
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"The nature of impending fatherhood is that you are doing something that you're unqualified to do, and then you become qualified while doing it."
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"standing in line is a form of oppression"
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"I'm not from Indianapolis, but I like living in Indianapolis. If I were to explain it, I'd tell someone to imagine a city that perfectly captures the best and the worst of America. Imagine the truly American city, because that's what it is."
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"Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal."
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"That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without."
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"We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature."
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"I'm a good person but a shitty writer. You're a shitty person but a good writer. We'd make a good team."
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"This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library."
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"I mean, it’s stupid to miss someone you didn’t even get along with. But I don’t know, it was nice, you know, having someone you could always fight with."
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