John Quotes

The light filtered throught the leaves and pine needles above as if through lace, the ground spotted in shadow.

Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.

The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves

Ben Starling, you better not have bought your token black friend a racist shirt

How can you seperate those things though? The people are the place is the people.

The snow may be falling in the winter of my discontent, but at least I've got sarcastic company.

I hate the rich snots here with a fervent passion I usually reserve only for dental work and my father.

A Margo for each of us--and each more mirror than window.

I always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring. I doubted I could explain it to someone like Margo but drawing circles through life struck me as a kind of reasonable insanity.

Even with everything broken and decided inside her she couldn't quite allow herself to disappear for good.

In retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.

I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself to train my body for real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.

For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

Margo says, "I know what she's talking about. The something deeper and more secret. It's like cracks inside of you. Like there are these fault lines where things don't meet up right.

The five of us walking confidently in a row, I'd never felt cooler. The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible. The plan may have had faults, but we did not.

Shouldn't letting go be painless if you've never learned how to hold on?

Colin had always preferred baths; one of his general policies in life was never to do anything standing up that could just as easily be done lying down

I make a gesture that is intended to convey, "Hey, no hurry, talk as long as you'd like," and probably actually conveys, "Hey, look at me! I have spastic hands.

Random questions are the least random of all questions.

You can't dingleberry that! That's a flagrant misuse of the dingleberry!

And I wrote my way out of the labyrinth.

It was not an eventful day. I should have done extraordinary things. I should have sucked the marrow out of life. But on that day, I slept eighteen hours out of a possible twenty-four.

If you act out of a paranoid fear of something happening, you will always make that thing happen.

Something about me has always liked the drama and inconvience of bad weather. The worse the better, really.

How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked. “Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.

You can't just make me different, and the leave. Because I was fine before.

She spoke quietly then, the tiniest crack in her voice, and all at once Lacey Pemerton was not Lacey Pemberton. She was just—like, a person.

And I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, 'This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.

You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you. All efforts to save me from you will fail.

His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn't even know that guys could turn me on-not, like, in real life

When surprised and excited and innocent Gus emerged from Grand Gesture Metaphorically Inclined Augustus, I literally could not resist.

I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.

The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.

So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay. -- Robert Frost

While I did not fancy myself a particularly good person, I never thought my first real sexual action would be prostitutional.

The last time I was this scared, I peed myself." "The last time I was this scared," Radar says, "I actually had to face a Dark Lord in order to make the world safe for wizards.

I can almost imagine a happiness without her, the ability to let her go, to feel our roots are connected even if I never see that leaf of grass again.'

I spy with my little eye a great story.

You are a side effect," Van Houten continued, "of an evolutionary process that cares little for individual lives. You are a failed experiment in mutation.

I like this world. I like drinking champagne. I like not smoking. I like Dutch people speaking Dutch.

Anyway, that was the last good day I had with Gus until the Last Good Day.

We gotta do something about this frigging swing set,' he said. 'I'm telling you, it's ninety percent of the problem.

Are you currently at your house?" he asked. "Um, no," I said. "That was a trick question. I knew the answer, because I am currently at your house.

Your driving is unpleasant, but it isn't technically unsafe.

Ma'am," Augustus said, nodding toward her, "Your daughter's car has just been deservingly egged by a blind man. Please close the door and go back inside or we'll be forced to call the police.

We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus.

Like all sick children,' he answered dispassionately, 'you say you don't want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.

At the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.

She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth.

And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.