Quote

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.

John Green

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Green
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: August 24
Author
Businessperson
Critic
Editor
Film Producer
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Podcaster
Singer
Indianapolis
Indiana
John Michael Green
Right
Books
Real
High
Symbolism
Important
Anyone
Metaphor
Life
Girl
Reasons
Like
School
Asking
Also
Boys
Reason
Example
Book
Question

More quotes by John Green

Image
The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness: 'I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.
John Green
Image
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.
John Green
Image
One of the jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our everyday lives.
John Green
Image
I even tried to tell myself to live my best life today.
John Green
Image
And then it was the kind of dark your eyes never adjust to.
John Green
Image
We're going to get gored to death by a feral fugging hog and your best strategy is to pretend it's a grizzly bear?
John Green
Image
The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn't actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn't get smallpox.
John Green
Image
It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.
John Green
Image
Like all sick children,' he answered dispassionately, 'you say you don't want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.
John Green
Image
People are supposed to care. It's good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they're gone.
John Green
Image
...Kaitlyn never wore open-toed shoes on account of how she hated her feet because she felt her second toes were too long, as if the second toe was a window into the soul or something.
John Green
Image
I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person yet.
John Green
Image
. . . Endlessness is a really strange idea in a universe that is defined by its endings.
John Green
Image
Dear Jane, Just so you know: e. e. cummings cheated on both of his wives. With prostitutes. Yours, Will Grayson
John Green
Image
Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.
John Green
Image
I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life.
John Green
Image
I was born into Bolívar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps.
John Green
Image
Mental health days only exist for people who have the luxury of saying 'I don't want to deal with things today' and then can take the whole day off, while the rest of us are stuck fighting the fights we always fight, with no one really caring one way or another, unless...
John Green
Image
Some people have lives some people have music.
John Green
Image
It seems to me that all the things we keep in sealed boxes are both alive and dead until we open the box, that the unobserved is both there and not.
John Green