Look, sometimes you just need to bask in some beautiful John Green quotes, and maybe get those quotes turned into home decor. I have a gorgeous “My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations” hanging above my desk, next to my Hemingway “Write drunk; edit sober” print. I look at them every day and feel comforted. And when I’m writing, and get frustrated, I just look up and see those two prints and feel better. I can do it.
And I know I’m not alone in saying John Green’s books helped me in a time when I needed help. They’re wonderful friends I can keep nearby and return to whenever I need a boost. Here are some of my favorite John Green quotes from each of his novels, along with some pretty prints you can purchase on Etsy.
Quotes from Looking for Alaska
$6 at Etsy
“Thomas Edison’s last words were ‘It’s very beautiful over there’. I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.”
“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
“When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.”
$12 at Etsy
“You can’t just make me different and then leave.”
“It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”
“So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
Quotes from An Abundance of Katherines
$14 at Etsy
“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: Put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”
“How do you just stop being terrified of getting left behind and ending up by yourself forever and not meaning anything to the world?”
“You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.”
Quotes from Paper Towns
$15 at Etsy
“Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.”
“It’s so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
“When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
$5 at Etsy
“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
“I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”
“It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”
Quotes from The Fault in Our Stars
$10 at Etsy
“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
“You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”
“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”
$17 at Etsy
“It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”
“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”
Quotes from Turtles All the Way Down
$2 at Etsy
“Your now is not your forever.”
“I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.”
“True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice on the matter.”
$16 at Etsy
I don’t know about you, but now I’m going to try to read all 99 book recommendations from John Green.
