John Green

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.

One day, you’re 17 and you’re planning for someday. And then quietly, without you ever really noticing, someday is today. And then someday is yesterday. And this is your life.

You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.

It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.

There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.

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

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

To be alive at all is to have scars.