John Green Quotes

I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.

In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.

Nobody lives forever and I've had a blessed life.

Cancer makes you realise that you will be dead one day. It's so common seeing people dying and falling sick, but we aren't really ever able to comprehend it ourselves. The realisation that I am here for a certain period of time and will be gone after that made me value my time and life.

I often wish for the end of the wretched remnant of my life; and that wish is a rational one; but then the innate principle of self-preservation, wisely implanted in our natures, for obvious purposes, opposes that wish, and makes us endeavour to spin out our thread as long as we can, however decayed and rotten it may be.

From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.

Nothing lasts forever. That's the tragedy and the miracle of existence - that everything is impermanent. Everything changes. All we can do is make the best of the time we have. And go down shooting, naturally.

No man at all can be living forever and we must be satisfied.

No one loses any other life than the one he now lives, nor does one live any other life than that which he will lose.

Why don't we all just go crazy when we know were going to croak? Because the mind's a monkey. You put things in departments and you go ahead. You go on and plan for the future and assume that the future's going to work out okay. Yet we know that sooner or later we're all going to be eating worms, whether it's fifty years or sixty. It might be tomorrow. It might happen today.

What if one were up there, drifting about among suns and feeling the tails of comets fan one's forehead! How small the earth was and how puny the people; a Norway of two million provincial souls and a mortgage bank to help feed them! What was life worth at such a rate? You elbowed yourself ahead in the sweat of your face for a few mortal years, only to perish all the same, all the same!

How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death I am not like a man who, having left home in his youth, has forgotten the way back?

Here it comes. My inevitable death, ignoring me all those years when I wished for it daily, arriving only after I've decided I want to live forever.

The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.

the brut first knows death when it dies, but man draws consciously nearer to it every hour that he lives; and this makes his life at times a questionable good even to him who has not recognised this character of constant anaihilation in the whole of life.

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me, I'm already gone.

I think the meaning of the universe is bound up with the egg. ... I am fed up with the meaning of the universe. Everything starts in the egg and ends in death. I think it's called 'the heartbreak at the heart of things.' But then perhaps our very mortality is an egg and at the moment of death our souls will emerge like damp chicks.

It is worth while dying, to find out what life is.

Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death - this infantile fixation of mine - was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry - with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'

Do mortal fools still measure the increments leading to their deaths, wagering pleasures against costs, persisting in the delusion that deeds have value, that the world and all the gods sit in judgment over every decision made or not made?

To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.

We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.

God bless this tiny little boat, And me who travels in it. It stays afloat for years and years, And sinks within a minute. And so the soul in which we sail, Unknown by years of thinking, Is deeply felt and understood, The minute that it’s sinking.

Our lives can't be measured by our final years, of this I am sure.

Man is unique in that, unlike animals, he knows he is going to die, and unlike animals he can do something about it.