John Green Quotes

A person never knows their own true face. Everybody thinks that the phoney, posed social mask they wear is their real face.

The whole image thing gets in the way. Then there are the guys that it excites them and it's what draws them to me. But I don't know whether they would care for me if I didn't have this image.

It took me 30 years to figure out who I really am, as a person, and who I want to surround myself with. I was very much the kind of person who would just meld in with whatever group I was near.

I think the most important thing in life is self-love, because if you don't have self-love, and respect for everything about your own body, your own soul, your own capsule, then how can you have an authentic relationship with anyone else?

I've never not felt relevant.

To know me is to love me. This cliche is popular for a reason, because most of us, I imagine, believe deep in our hearts that if anyone truly got to know us, they'd truly get to love us - or at least know why we're the way we are. The problem in life, maybe the central problem, is that so few people ever seem to have sufficient curiosity to do the job on us that we know we deserve.

Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.)

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

Just be yourself, there is no one better.

Did you get so caught up in the preoccupancy of a relationship that you lost who you were or were busy in life or career that you, like Adam and Eve, got lost in the garden putting fig leaf after fig leaf title, relationship, this accolade, this saying over you that you forgot who you were and what's life's about? So getting back to the core of that and building life by design, that is authentic.

I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I'd like to be known.

In those places of doubt and even darkness I've realized that who I am has nothing to do with wins or losses, applause, or negative criticism. It has to do with whose I am.

My problem with the search for the badge of real is that it trades your goals and your happiness for someone else's.

I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.

I always think that if I'm with somebody, they're better than me. That's why I love them. They're amazing.

I'm convinced I got signed because of who I am. And it makes me sad.

We are more than the work we perform. In fact, I'd say that our work is a mere representation of who we are underneath.

Because too much of my life was spent waiting to be seen. Hoping to be seen, hoping to be picked. Once you realize that you aren't looked at that way any more, other things start to happen and you have to depend on other things to get by.

My success is not who I am.

I must be very clear in one thing... Being a pageant girl is not who I am or what defines me.

My dad's songs were really written to make certain people feel as though they had some kind of value. Because they were told from where they work and from the countries they had immigrated from that they did not.

If you lose who you are, what do you have?

I don't know how to make Harper and Alloy want me, not just my name.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

I'd say for those people who don't feel like they fit in, I'd want them to ask themselves why they want to, who they are trying to please, and whether or not those people are worth it. You know what they say: 'If they don't want you, then they don't deserve to have you.'