I Have a Literary Crush

I had another post that was rarin' to go today, about caffeine addiciton, that I had already started, but when I  was perusing my twitter, saw John Green Tweeted a link to his blog, and said that he was answering questions all day today.  And as I read, I knew I was abandoning my coffee soaked screed about the wonder of what happens when you mix ice and coffee and milk and sugar and apply liberally to your central nervous system, to talk about John Green


Whenever I read things John Green has written, something stops me in my tracks.  The same goes with a lot of his Vlogbrothers videos.  He has such an elegant way of  phrasing things, and putting together ideas, that a lot of the time, I just stop and marvel at the craft and beauty of his writing and ideas.   Not only in his books, which are uniformly great, but even in things like blog posts, and the one linked above today especially.  I was reading, and he was answering a question about symbolism in books, and he said  "Reading critically and nonliterally is a huge part of being a person: It is through metaphor and symbolism that we enter into the life of someone else, and begin to ask their big questions as if they were our own."
YES.   Wholeheartedly yes. The point of reading, and good writing, is that it forces you to think about your life in a new way and to ask the big questions.  This is what I'm thinking when I read the books that have changed my life.  This is what I'm doing when I try to write (and largely fail).


He also writes a lot about imagining people complexly, which is something that I am constantly trying to do. No person is all anything, and interactions that you have with others are also a reflection on who you are as much as who they are.

 His writing also makes my heart ache with jealously, because I don't have a tenth of the talent that he does, but I'm going to keep trying, because I'm not going to get any better if I don't write.


He also has one of my favorite pieces of advice given ever to a young girl who asked about if she should play dumb because the boy that she liked thought that she was too smart:


"The venn diagram of boys who don’t like smart girls and boys you don’t wanna date is a circle."


and now some John Green quotes that make me happy:


"What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?"
— John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)


"Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old."
— John Green (Paper Towns)


"I don't like reindeer. They seem like regular deer, only more dangerous."
— John Green


"But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)


"Thomas Edison’s last words were: ‘It’s very beautiful over there.’ I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)




"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)


"That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of."
— John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)




"As long as we don't die, this gonna be on hell of a story."
— John Green (Paper Towns)


"You like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot."
— John Green (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)


"I feel like my life is so scattered right now. Like it's all the small pieces of paper and someone's turned on the fan. But, talking to you makes me feel like the fan's been turned off for a little bit. Like things could actually make sense. You completely unscatter me, and I appreciate that so much."
— John Green (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)