16 Romantic John Green Quotes That Will Shred Your Soul to Bits

John Green fans, you know what I'm talking about when I say his written words cause a literal pain in my chest . . . but I live for it. Plain and simple, the guy just knows how to write beautiful prose without crossing into the land of cheesy. It's high time we collect John's greatest book quotes to date — ahead are 16 blurbs that'll have you sobbing, smiling, or sobbing through your smiles.

An Abundance of Katherines
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An Abundance of Katherines

1. "Here's to all the places we went. And all the places we'll go. And here's to me, whispering again and again and again and again: iloveyou."

2. "The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn't over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you as if it were a secret, and an immense one."

3. "That smile could end wars and cure cancer."

The Fault in Our Stars
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The Fault in Our Stars

4. "'I'm in love with you,' he said quietly.

'Augustus,' I said.

'I am,' he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. 'I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.'"

5. "As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once."

6. "There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful."

7. "But I believe in true love, you know? I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does."

8. "Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence."

9. "Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you."

Looking For Alaska
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Looking For Alaska

10. "I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not f*ck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. 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 hurricane."

11. "Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again."

Paper Towns
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Paper Towns

12. "The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the Queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman."

13. "Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one."

14. "I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I've never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero's errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I've ever done."

Will Grayson, Will Grayson
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Will Grayson, Will Grayson

15. "Maybe there's something you're afraid to say, or someone you're afraid to love, or somewhere you're afraid to go. It's gonna hurt. It's gonna hurt because it matters."

16. "Being in a relationship, that's something you choose. Being friends, that's just something you are. [But] I do pick you. We've been friends too long to pick, but if we could pick, I'd pick you."