John Green

We are taught that the hero__ journey is the journey from weakness to strength. But I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero__ journey is the journey from strength to weakness.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves._ Easy enough to say when you__e a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.

There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.

I have a date,' he explained. 'This is an emergency.' He paused to catch his breath. 'Do you know' - breath - 'how to iron?' I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled like an old woman who'd spent her youth sunbathing. If only the Colonel didn't ball up his every belonging and stuff it into random dresser drawers. 'I think you just turn it on and press it against the shirt, right?' I said. 'I don't know. I didn't even know we had an iron.' 'We don't. It's Takumi's. But Takumi doesn't know how to iron, either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, "You're not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me." Oh God, I need to smoke. I need to smoke, but I can't reek when I see Sara's parents. Okay, screw it. We're going to smoke in the bathroom with the shower on. The shower has steam. Steam gets rid of wrinkles, right?

Suffering can bend & break us. But it can also break us open to become the persons God intended us to be. It depends on what we do with the pain. If we offer it back to God, He will use it to do great things in us & through us, because suffering is fertile... it an grow new life.

The prank is entitled "Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm".

I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I'd never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote ("NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,

...there are books...which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

For me, at least, fiction is the only way i can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

I just want to domething that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.

The marks we leave are too often scars.

The gray paint peels off the wall in odd and beautiful patterns, each cracked polygon of paint a snowflake of decay.

It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing attainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who's kinda bossy, then I had to basically start liking a whole different person.

We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.

A poem can't do its work if you only read snippets of it.

I think the future deserves our faith. But it is hard to argue with Emily Dickinson.

I'm really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what.