The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.
Interpretation
Illness might alter the way we express creativity and reflect on life, but it doesn't eliminate those desires.
In this quote, John Green suggests that even in the face of illness, the fundamental human urges to create art and ponder philosophical questions persist. Instead of disappearing, these urges are transformed by the experience of being unwell, reflecting how our struggles can reshape our perspectives and creative expressions.
In practice
During a speech on creativity at a health awareness event.
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.
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
Sometimes I wish that just solving the plot problems was enough. And then elves would go and do all the actual work moving the words around.
Music is a powerful tool in galvanizing people around an issue. There's no better way to get your point across than to put it in a beautiful song.
When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.
I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.
I realized with Broadway everything written for black people is usually written in the past, and I'm kind of a contemporary guy. I don't think you want to see me in 'Raisin in the Sun'.
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