If you don't say the honest thing, it never becomes true.
Interpretation
Honesty is essential for truth to exist; without expressing it, it remains unacknowledged.
This quote emphasizes the importance of honesty in our lives. John Green suggests that simply withholding the truth prevents it from being recognized or accepted, highlighting the need to communicate openly and authentically for personal and interpersonal truths to emerge and be validated.
In practice
During a team meeting, someone might use this quote to encourage open dialogue.
Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?" "Sometimes people don't always understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said. Isaac shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?" I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.
Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.
I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.
I don't think pandemics make us afraid of death, I think they make us afraid of oblivion. They force us to grapple with the futility of effort. Also they make us barf which isn't fun either... Wash your hands, cover your coughs, and find a way to hold in balance the futility of effort with the necessity to struggle.
So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that's not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered. I have found this very useful to think about over the years, and I find that it is a lot easier and more bearable to be sad when you aren't constantly berating yourself for being sad.
We kiss. Her hands are freezing on my face, and she tastes like coffee and the smell of the onion is still stuck in my nose, and my lips are all dry from the endless winter. And it's awesome.
The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.
It is good even for old men to learn wisdom.
Heartache forces us to embrace God out of desparate, urgent need. God is never closer than when your heart is aching.
It wasn’t in books. It wasn’t in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.
No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.
We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature.
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