John Green Quotes

Cancer is such a wake-up call to remind us how high the cosmic stakes really are and how short and brief and frail life really is.

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

Men and women, empires and cities, thrones, principalities, and powers, mountains, rivers, and unfathomed seas, worlds, spaces, and universes, all have their day, and all must go.

We all live in this little bubble that we just expect to live forever and I think those of us that have been with people battling cancer, you realise, actually, this surrounds us everywhere we go.

Just as a line drawn on water with a stick will quickly vanish and will not last long; even so, brahmins, is human life like a line drawn on water. It is short, limited, and brief; it is full of suffering. One should do good and live a pure life; for none who is born can escape death.

Everything is changeable, everything appears and disappears; there is no blissful peace until one passes beyond the agony of life and death.

The cancer of time is eating us away

Love, sex, food, friendship, art, play, beauty and the simple pleasure of a cup of tea are all well and good, but never forget that God/the universe is determined to kill you by whatever means necessary.

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

The first kind of evil is that which is caused to man by the circumstance that he is subject to genesis and destruction, or that he possesses a body.

Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.

Warre is deaths feast.

When death brings at last the desired forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a continual "has been," a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.

Alas! that my body, clean and whole, never been corrupted, today must be consumed and burnt to ashes!

I don’t want friends to die...or fade away. I don’t want battles where we have to lose in order to win.

I daresay it seems foolish; perhaps all our earthly trials will appear foolish to us after a while; perhaps they seem so now to angels. But we are ourselves, you know, and this is now, not some time to come, a long, long way off. And we are not angels, to be comforted by seeing the ends for which everything is sent.

There are three great events in our lives: birth, life and death. Of birth we have no conscience; with death, we suffer; and, concerning life, we forget to live it.

Alas, poor men, their destiny. When all goes well a shadow will overthrow it. If it be unkind one stroke of a wet sponge wipes all the picture out.

As long as one can suffer, one is living....live and suffer until life is gone.

Each of us A cell of awareness Imperfect and incomplete Genetic blends With uncertain ends On a fortune hunt that's far too fleet

To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.

All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

I believe in that line from An Imperial Affliction. 'The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.' That's God, I think, the rising sun, and the light is too bright and her eyes are losing but they aren't lost.