We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths.

About John Green

Portrait of John Green

John Michael Green (born August 24, 1977) is an American author and YouTuber. His books have more than 50 million copies in print worldwide, including The Fault in Our Stars (2012), which is one of the best-selling books of all time. Green's rapid rise to fame and idiosyncratic voice are...

More quotations from John Green

The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.

I started thinking about little kids putting a cylindrical peg through a circular hole, and how they do it over and over again for months when they figure it out, and how basketball was basically just a slightly more aerobic version of that same exercise.

That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.

If the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.

ignorance inevitability worries oblivion

You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.

—John Green in Turtles All the Way Down

love memory becoming