"That is, to me at least, one of the most helpful and useful things books do for us: They are generous enough to allow us to choose what matters to us."
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John Green quotes (page 47 of 69)
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"In general-like not just in fiction but in life-it doesn't work out well when someone imagines someone else as a manic pixie dream girl or an Edward Cullen or anything other than a full, complex human being. That said, while I've tried to reflect that in my books, I don't think I've always succeeded, because I am always running up against my own insufficiencies and biases etc."
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"Books are seldom useful unless they are also beautiful."
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"Truth defies simplicity."
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"Okay, maybe I'm not such a shitty writer. But I can't pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations."
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"...I will continue to underscore that I don't think authorial intent is all that important to a reading experience, and I certainly don't think the job of reading is to divine authorial intent."
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"One of the reasons that metaphor and symbolism are important in books is because they are also important to life. Like, for example say you're in high school and you're a boy and you say to a girl: "Do you like anyone right now?" - that's not the question you're asking. The question you're asking is, "do you like me right now.""
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"You don't want romantic advice from me, you want romantic advice from Edward Cullen. I completely understand but he is completely unavailable right now and I'll tell you why. He doesn't exist."
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"Frankly, I kind of want you to be haunted by the unansweredness of the question, because I think being haunted by such things is a valuable part of being a person."
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"Gus: "It tastes like..." Me: "Food." Gus: "Yes, precisely. It tastes like food, excellently prepared. But it does not taste, how do I put this delicately...?" Me: "It does not taste like God Himself cooked heaven into a series of five dishes which were then served to you accompanied by several luminous balls of fermented, bubbly plasma while actual and literal flower petals floated down around your canal-side dinner table." Gus: "Nicely phrased." Gus's father: "Our children are weird." My dad: "Nicely phrased.""
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"Nothing (at least that can be done by humans) immortalizes anyone. The Fault in Our Stars will hopefully have a long and wonderful life, but it will eventually go out of print, and eventually the last person ever to read it will die, and then the characters will no longer live in any consciousness.Also, that is okay. That is good, actually. That is how it should be. One of the things the characters in this novel have to grapple with is the reality of temporaryness. What Gus in particular must reconcile himself to is that being temporary does not mean being unimportant or meaningless."
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"So I let her go, too. And I'm sorry."
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"I leaned in toward her, suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that we must kiss."
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"You could drive past it without noticing and from what I understand, you ought to."
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"Our children are weird. Nicely phrased."
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"Why are breakfast foods breakfast foods?"
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"Don't swear in the Literal Heart of Jesus."
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"Nothing has ever looked like that ever in all of human history."
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"It is not my fault that my parents own the world's largest collection of black Santas."
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"I didn't even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it."
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