John Green Quotes

How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.

Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

I don't give a toss about being remembered after my death.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

I don't care much whether people remember me or not. If people remember, well and good. If they don't remember, it's alright - I'm dead anyway.

It doesn't worry me how I'm remembered.

Everyone dies, and I am not, you know, I don't believe in the Homeric idea that, you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?

Who gives a damn about being remembered? That's really for amateurs.

The deep waters of time will flow over us: only a few men of genius will lift a head above the surface, and though doomed eventually to pass into the same silence, will fight against oblivion and for a long time hold their own.

When I'm dead are they going to remember me ? I don't really think about it, it's up to them. When I'm dead, who cares ? I don't.

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

The second death. To think that you died and no one would remember you. I wondered if this was why we tried so hard to make our mark in America. To be known. Think of how important celebrity has become. We sing to get famous; expose our worst secrets to get famous; lose weight, eat bugs, even commit murder to get famous. Our young people post their deepest thoughts on public web sites. They run cameras from their bedrooms. It’s as if we are screaming Notice Me! Remember Me! Yet the notoriety barely lasts. Names quickly blur and in time are forgotten.

Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.

Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry.

Oblivion is the rule and fame the exception, of humanity.

To be remembered at all is an achievement of sorts.

I can't be a legend yet. I'm not dead.

Nobody will go on being remembered for a very long time, unless you're Shakespeare or Milton. I have no hope of being remembered at all.

Just to be remembered is good enough for me. Lots of people are forgotten.

A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

Of all the delusions that existed, Posthumous Fame was the greatest.

I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.