Here is letting you guys in on a secret. I am a voracious reader and writer. 8 out of 10 times, I don't publish what I write, the words stay safe in the drafts. The hardest part of writing is probably the weird thought cycles. And that is because you just read so much, so so much, and there are so many different thought patterns you catch there and ugh. There is one quote that summarizes every writer :
"You write so wonderfully, your head must be a terrible place."
If there is one writer who has changed my perception of life, made me question my existence and everything I believed in, makes me question my existence and everything I believe in, its John Green. Nothing can ever provide the solace that his books, his words provide. I can't even begin to explain the profound impact this guy has on me :)
This evening my little sister surprised me beyond limits. She isn't the types that reads, she hardly ever looks twice at a book title :\ Recently, Looking For Alaska was around and she wanted to read, solely because the number of pages looked readable you know, and not "Di, that book can make such a nice coffee stand, so many pages". I was ecstatic. So I gave her the book, and this evening, madam had made a John Green Quotes board on Pinterest, pinning her favorite quotes, WRITING DOWN, I MEAN NOTING DOWN IN PENCIL the favoriter quotes into her books.
Its a miracle I didn't burst, I was swelling with pride.
So I decided to make a list of mine in no particular order. That man is a genius, you can't order favorites.
All quotes belong to John Green, ofcourse. I have intentionally left the name of the book the quote belongs to. So if you like a quote, Google it for more. That way, if you are new to John Green, you might like him. If not, you'll fall more in love.
1.“My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.”
2. “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.”
3. “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.”
4. “What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”
5. “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
6. “The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
7. “Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”
8. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.”
9. “You can love someone so much. But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”
10. “Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.”
11. “What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
12. “I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. 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 hurricane.”
13. “That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.”
14. “It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
15. “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.”
16. “Some people have lives; some people have music.”
17. “Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence”
18. “You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.”
19. “At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.”
20. “Maybe there's something you're afraid to say, or someone you're afraid to love, or somewhere you're afraid to go. It's gonna hurt. It's gonna hurt because it matters.”
21. “You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”
22. “I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.”
23. “Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.”
24. “And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.”
25. “Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.”
26. “Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war”
27. “I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.”
28. “When things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It's because a little piece gets lost - the two remaining ends couldn't fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.”
29. “I just did some calculations and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit.”
30. “I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
31. “Here's to all the places we went. And all the places we'll go. And here's to me, whispering again and again and again and again: iloveyou”
32. “NO. No no no. I don't want to screw you. I just love you. When did who you want to screw become the whole game? Since when is the person you want to screw the only person you get to love? It's so stupid, Tiny! I mean, Jesus, who even gives a fuck about sex?! People act like it's the most important thing humans do, but come on. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them? Those are important questions, I guess. But they're not that important. You know what's important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don't even know why he needs you? Whose drunken nose would you pick?!”
33. “The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water's death with was Augustus Waters.”
34. “That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.”
35. “Come over here so I can examine your face with my hands and see deeper into your soul than a sighted person ever could.”
36. “Maybe all the strings inside him broke.”
37. “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.”
38. “We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.”
39. “Caring doesn't sometimes lead to misery. It always does.”
40. “I'm starting to realize that people lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, & so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.”
41. “He responded a few minutes later.
Okay.
I wrote back.
Okay.
He responded:
Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!”
42. “Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them.”
43. “Because you're only thinking they-might-not-like-me-they-might-not-like-me, and guess what? When you act like that, no one likes you.”
44. “Nerd girls are the world’s most underutilized romantic resource. And guys, do not tell me that nerd girls are not hot because that shows a Paris Hilton-esque failure to understand hotness.”
45. “Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”
46. “Don't you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don't love the crazy, sullen bitch.”
47. “But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.”
48. “That smile could end wars and cure cancer.”
49. “The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.”
50. “Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it."
So long :)
*sigh* I don't even know how to respond to this post. To be honest, I've never even realized that some of my favorite quotes belong to him. And yet, his books are not exactly the kind I read. I guess it's like he says, maybe our favorite quotations do indeed say more about us than the stories and people we are quoting :)
ReplyDeleteI'm so gonna read up on more of his works asap!
And... I really do hope you post at least a majority of what you write. Idk there's something really fresh and beautiful about your writing :)
Aaww! Please go read, this guy writes wonderfully :)
DeleteAnd haha, I shall :D
Thank you Sakshi, you are ever so sweet! :)
I laughed hard at the 44th one ..:)
ReplyDeleteIts awesome, isn't it? :)
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