814 Quotes About John-green

You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It’s so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you didn’t even know why you need it, you just think you do.

I don’t think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.

That’s how I remember things, anyway. I remember stories.

I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don’t fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don’t see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see shapes, you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.

And the moral of the story is that you don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened. And the second moral of the story, if a story can have multiple morals, is that Dumpers are not inherently worse than Dumpees – breaking up isn’t something that gets done to you, it’s something that happens with you.

Infinite and unknowable and beautiful

And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don’t just make us matter to each other – maybe they’re also the only way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long.

An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward – even smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter – maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.

Whereupon we immediately discovered that we led radically different lives and didn’t have all that much in common.