John Green Ad Quotations

All the characters are made out of words. With reading, I understand that the people aren't real but the fact that they are made out of language and are made out of words is extremely powerful to me. It becomes transformative for me. Different people have different ways of trying to make stories using language.

By the way, I've decided to start referring to myself exclusively as 'Daddy.' Everytime Daddy would otherwise say 'I' or 'Me,' Daddy is now going to say 'Daddy.

Reading it the night before, I'd wondered if it would be like that for me-if in one moment, I would finally understand her, know her, and understand the role I'd played in her dying. But I wasn't convinced enlightenment struck like lightining.

That's the great thing about being in the third grade. If you've got one polysyllabic adjective, everyone thinks you're a genius.

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."

There are many more jobs out there than you have ever heard of. Your dream job might not yet exist. If you had told 'College Me' that I would become a professional YouTuber, I would've been like, "That is not a word, and it never should be."

Do not worry too much about your lawn. You will soon find if you haven't already that almost every adult American devotes tremendous time and money to the maintenance of an invasive plant species called turf grass that we can't eat. I encourage you to choose better obsessions.

Ultimately what I like about reading together is that we all make it happen together. Of course even amid shared experience we’re still alone… each reading of each book is unique. But what a comfort it is to share readings and experiences. How lucky we are when we get to be alone together.

At some point, I realized I was Kaitlyning the encounter, so I decided to text Kaitlyn and ask for some advice.

I didn't want to see them lower him into the ground in the spot he'd picked out with his dad, and I didn't want to see his parents sink to their knees in the dew-wet grass and moan in pain....

And I put the latte down on a table, awash in the happy middle of my greatest adventure.

Dad had a sign of his own. MY BEAUTIFUL FAMILY, it read, and then underneath that (AND GUS).

Mom sobbed something into Dad's chest that I wish I hadn't heard, and that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said, "I won't be a mom anymore." It gutted me pretty badly.

Colin emphatically pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading. "Did you like it?" His dad asked. "Yup," Colin said. He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

I stood under the awning for a moment, but finally I decided that being in a bad mood with your friends beats being in a bad mood without them.

You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.

I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointments in the Department of Having a Voice that Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin.

Cause I'm just - I want to go to Amsterdam, and I want him to tell me what happens after the book is over, and I just don't want my particular life, and also the sky is depressing me, and there is this old swing set out here that my dad made for me when I was a kid.' 'I must see this old swing set of tears immediately,' he said. 'I'll be over in twenty minutes.

I thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience.

What can we do?" Mom asked again. I shrugged. But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.

I couldn’t help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them—it was a kind of sad I didn’t mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

Something about me has always liked the drama and inconvience of bad weather. The worse the better, really.

More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi's headrest, and I cried, whimpering, and I didn't even feel sadness so much as pain.

Like the way the sun is right now, with the long shadows, and that kind of bright, soft light you get when the sun isn't quite setting? That's the light that makes everything better, everything prettier, and today, everything just seemed to be in that light.

Sunlight feels warm and rough against your skin like a kiss on the cheek from your dad.

The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves

Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.

The light filtered throught the leaves and pine needles above as if through lace, the ground spotted in shadow.

Great news for someone is always bad news for someone else

I'm a bad boyfriend. She's a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going.

A small olive-skinned creature who had hit puberty but never hit it very hard, Ben had been my best friend since fifth grade, when we both finally owned up to the fact that neither of us was likely to attract anyone else as a best friend.

Daddy is trying really fugging hard to think of a not-terrifying reason why you'd wake Daddy up in the middle of the night to ask that fugging question. But no. No. Daddy does not have a match or a lighter.

We acknowledge that being the person God made you cannot separate you from God's love.

You can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can't say that Alabamans as a people are duly afraid of deep fryers.

My inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves.

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.

The joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.

Waffles аrе јust awesome bread.

We do an epically bad job of acknowledging one another's work and checking our sources.

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it's printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.

Whether the author intended a symbolic resonance to exist in her book is irrelevant. All that matters is whether it's there. Because the book does not exist for the benefit of the author, the book exists for the benefit of YOU. If we as readers can have a bigger and richer experience with the world as a result of reading a symbol and that symbol wasn't intended by the author, WE STILL WIN.

Reading forces you to be quiet in a world that no longer makes place for that.

If he is anything other than a total gentleman, I’m going to gouge his eyes out.” “So you’re into it.” “Withholding judgment! When can I see you?” “Certainly not until you finish An Imperial Affliction.” I enjoyed being coy. “Then I’d better hang up and start reading.” “You’d better,” I said, and the line clicked dead without another word. Flirting was new to me, but I liked it.

I pulled the oxygen tubes from my nostrils and raised the tube up over my head, handing it to Dad. I wanted it to be just me and just him.

In the ensuing silence, I have time to contemplate the word cute— how dismissive it is, how it’s the equivalent of calling someone little, how it makes a person into a baby, how the word is a neon sign burning through the dark reading, “Feel Bad About Yourself.

I thought of the one thing about home that I missed, my dad's study with its built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves sagging with thick biographies and the black leather chair that kept me just uncomfortable enough to keep from feeling sleepy as I read.

Also, it was a bit hopeless," he said. "A bit defeatist." "If by defeatist you mean honest, then I agree." "I don't think defeatism is honest, " Dad answered. "I refuse to accept that.

So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be seen. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved.

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.

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.

Waffles are just awesome bread.

Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon.

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.

We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.

So here's my advice: Study broadly and without fear. Learn a language if you can, because that will make your life more interesting. Read a little bit every day. But more importantly, surround yourself with people who you like and make cool stuff with them. In the end, what you do isn't going to be nearly as interesting or important as who you do it with.

We're all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers.

Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone.

She was not an adventure, she was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that's true whether you're reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It's always an imagining of what it's like to be someone else.

[This] is very important to remember when reading or writing or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

Teenage readers also have a different relationship with the authors whose work they value than adult readers do. I loved Toni Morrison, but I don't have any desire to follow her on Twitter. I just want to read her books.

She took it in, and I could tell it really registered with her. But she held her personal emotions to get the broadcast on the air.

The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.

We all romanticize the people we adore.

Books belong to their readers.

This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.

Bro, it's dark. You can't go to a strange building with a mysterious address in the dark. Haven't you ever seen a horror movie?

Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good—and amazingly underutilized—resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences.

pg. 231-232: They'd given me a minivan. They could have picked any car and they picked a minivan. A minivan. O God of the Vehicular Justice, why dost thou mock me? Minivan, you albatross around my neck! You mark of Cain! You wretched beast high ceilings and few horsepower!

She cannot possibly be dead, people do not just die

No reason to be angry. Anger just distracts from the all-encompassing sadness.

I wondered whether I could find a Great Perhaps here at all or whether I had made a grand miscalculation.

That was part of her, and you used to know it. It's like now you only care about the Alaska you made up.

You're not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me.

I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

...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.

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.

And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me.

I would argue that stupidity is born out of bad reading, bad teaching and bad thinking!

Ultimately, it doesn't matter if the author intended a symbol to be there, because the job of reading is not to understand the authors intend. The job of reading is to see into other people as we see ourselves.