If you haven’t heard of the Green brothers, let me give you a quick run down. John Green, (whose quotes I have featured in this article), has to be one of my favourite writers. If you’ve ever heard someone exclaim “Have you read TFIOS?!”, they are referring, not to some extra-terrestrial piece of literary material, but in fact, Green’s latest book The Fault In Our Stars. His others novels include Looking for Alaska, An 
Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns. His books far exceeded my expectations (and I had kept the bar quite high, listening to all the amazing recommendations I heard from friends). I encourage you all to check them out!
Together, him and his brother Hank Green both put up video blogs on their very popular YouTube channel Vlogbrothers. One of their most popular catch phrases is DFTBA, which for future reference, means “don’t forget to be awesome” in case you hear it from a fellow Nerdfighter (also known as John and Hank Green’s Fans) You may have even watched one of Hank’s Crash Course videos when cramming last minute for a biology or world history test. If you haven’t seen these, I recommend starting with That’s Why Carbon is a Tramp: Crash Course Biology #1. Don’t ask questions, just watch – I promise you won’t regret it!
Anyways, long story short, the thing I love about John Green’s writing (besides absolutely everything else), is that he’s so quotable and we all know how much I love quotes! Here are some of my favourites:
- “I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?”
- “At some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky or one of these days ,you’ll look back down and see that you’ve floated away too”
- “Grief does not change you…it reveals you”
- “You can love someone so much…But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”
- That’s the thing about pain…it demands to be felt”
- “The only way out of this labyrinth of suffering is to forgive”
- “The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
- “Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”
- “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.”
- “You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot. ”
- “Without pain, how could we know joy?’ This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”
- “But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”
