Em > Em's Quotes

“I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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, Looking for Alaska

“What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape 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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Because memories fall apart, too. And you're left with nothing.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“We are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible for me. And the accident, the suicide, would never be anything else, and I was left to ask, Did I help you to a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I jsut assist in your willful self-destruction? Because they are different crimes, and I didn't know wheter to feel angry at myself for letting go.
But we knew what could be found out, and in finding out, she had made us closer- the Colonel adn Takumi and me, anyway. And that was it. She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Scared isn't a good excuse. Scared is the excuse everyone has always used.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“She loved mysteries so much that she became one.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“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, Looking for Alaska

“I'm really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“So why don't you go home for vacations?' I asked her.
I'm just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“It's only forever...
Not long at all.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone's about to die.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I'd rather wonder than get answers I couldn't live with.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Before I got here, I thought that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it didn't 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. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied by the last words of the already dead, so I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And that could have happened to me, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it in spite of having lost her.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I wasn't disappointed. My expectations had been met.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska