"The town was paper, but the memories were not."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future--you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"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."
— John Green

""Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that i was not lost, but home.""
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn't planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together."
— John Green

"The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the Queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"But I believe I rather like superstitious people. They lend color to life. Wouldn't it be a rather drab world if everybody was wise and sensible . . . and good? What would we find to talk about?"
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Windy Poplars)

"“Ashes to ashes. Garage sale to garage sale,” I said."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"Margo glanced at her watch and help up two fingers. We waited. And for those two minutes we just stared at each other, and I watched the blue in her eyes. It was nice--in the dark and the quiet, with no possibility of me saying anything to screw it up, and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"…God, it’s over. Takumi, you gotta stop stealing other people’s problems and get some of your own."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"I said nothing—I hadn’t known Marya, and anyway, “listening quietly” was my general social strategy"
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"I like green eggs and ham! I like them Sam I Am!"
— Dr. Seuss

"No man can eat 50 eggs."
— Tre Cool

"Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing."
— Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

"Margo glanced at her watch and held up two fingers. We waited. And for those two minutes we just stared at each other, and I watched the blue in her eyes. It was nice--in the dark and the quiet, with no possibility of me saying anything to screw it up, and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"Even, she thought, even without the gift of witchsight, there was more beauty to be found in the world than could ever be snared in language or music. And with the sight..."
— Charles de Lint

"I'm doing much better now."
— Billie Joe Armstrong

"When a man pulls his pants down..."
— Billie Joe Armstrong

"Right then it was like, 'GLEAM!'"
— Billie Joe Armstrong

"A guy walks up to me and asks 'What's Punk?'. So I kick over a garbage can and say 'That's punk!'. So he kicks over a garbage can and says 'That's Punk?', and I say 'No that's trendy!"
— Billie Joe Armstrong

"W polowie drogi mojego zywota posrod ciemnego znalazlem sie lasu. Las ten co gorsza byl zielony."
— Witold Gombrowicz

"Her eyes were olive green--incisive and clear."
— Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code)

"They're gonna blow us up. And they got me to stand the closest to the f*cking fireworks. Are you kidding me? Huh? Huh? Good thing I'm good at stuff like this. I wasn't always a bass player."
— Mike Dirnt

"Are you rehabilitated now? Are you going to do that sort of thing again?"
— Tre Cool

"RUN!!"
— Tre Cool

"Yeah, they were like totally, you know, trying to muscle their way backstage, and they're like hanging around us..."
— Tre Cool

"You can't call the cops to kick the cop out, you know."
— Tre Cool

"Totally. Can't win."
— Mike Dirnt

"NOT IN WISCONSIN!"
— Tre Cool

"Didja ever look at a dollar bill, man? There's some spooky shit goin' on there. And it's green too. "
— Slater

"Fenugreek, Tuesday's spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain."
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (The Mistress of Spices: A Novel)

"She turned back to inspect a bank of greens: olive, jade, leaf, kiwi, lime, a silver-green like the back of birch leaves, a bright pistachio."
— Anne Bartlett (Knitting: A Novel)

"And the needles of the pine trees, freshly washed to a deep, rich green, shimmered with droplets that blinked like clear crystals."
— Billie Letts (Shoot the Moon)

"Save the Planet...Buy Organic"
— Rev. Dr. Nancy Philips

"One June evening, when the orchards were pink-blossomed again, when the frogs were singing silverly sweet in the marshes about the head of the Lake of Shining Waters, and the air was full of the savor of clover fields and balsamic fir woods, Anne was sitting by her gable window. She had been studying her lessons, but it had grown to dark to see the book, so she had fallen into wide-eyed reverie, looking out past the boughs of the Snow Queen, once more bestarred with its tufts of blossom."
— L.M. Montgomery

"Create the change you seek in the world.
Be an ecopreneur.
Launch your dream green business."
— John D. Ivanko

"By planting rye I am creating carbon sinks in my backyard, expanding my role in the carbon cycle, launching my own backyard campaign to offset global warming. My emissions, after all, reflect a rural but very comfortable life in which I enjoy goods that travel great distances - clementines from Spain, wine from California - and on the occasional holiday I fly south, seeking warmer places. Will planting rye in the shoulder seasons be enough to make a difference? Certainly not, but it is a gesture, a way to frame the question and provide a benchmark to judge the extent of my complicity."
— Amy Seidl (Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World)

"But they always just laugh off everything I say, when really I want absolutely nothing more than to destroy the world they live in and to watch them suffer, alone and miserable, trying to live in my world for a change!"
— Daniel Clowes (Caricature)

"What use is a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
"
— Thoreau

"We exist temporarily through what we take, but we live forever through what we give. "
— P. Lawson

"I was trying to discover examples of a living restoration, trying to go beyond discussions about correct historic colors, materials, and techniques.

I looked to the past for guidance, to find the graces we need to save. I want to be an importer. This is not nostalgia; I am not nostalgic. I am not looking for a way back. "From where will a renewal come to us, to us who have devastated the whole earthly globe?" asked Simone Weil. "Only from the past if we love it."

What I am looking for is the trick of having the same ax twice, for a restoration that renews the spirit, for work that transforms the worker. We may talk of saving antique linens, species, or languages; but whatever we are intent on saving, when a restoration succeeds, we rescue ourselves.

-- Howard Mansfield, The Same Ax Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age"
— Howard Mansfield