Between his six published novels, John Green has put a lot of words down on paper. Not included in any of those books, however, is a phrase that has commonly been attributed to him. The Fault in our Stars author and Vlogbrothers co-host has offered to compensate a fan after discovering that he didn’t write a supposed phrase from his book Paper Towns.
The phrase in question is “I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met,” and most of the “Nerdfighters” who post about Green’s work on platforms like Tumblr assumed it to be a line from Paper Towns, which was first published in 2008 and is currently being adapted into a feature film. In truth, Green did not write the line. Instead, it first popped up on the Tumblr page of 13-year-old Melody Truong.
This misattribution became a problem for Truong when Green’s fans began accusing her of stealing the quote from Green. In addition, Green sold a poster at his official store that features the quote, allowing him to profit from Truong’s turn of phrase.
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Truong’s friend wrote a post about the situation on Reddit, and Green himself dropped in to apologize. In explaining how he too had assumed the quote was his, he wrote “I am a bit embarrassed to learn that I did not write this, but not entirely surprised, since whenever I’ve seen the quote attributed to me, I’ve always thought, ‘Where is that quote in Paper Towns anyway? I don’t remember writing it.’ But then again, the book is seven years old, and there’s a lot in it that I don’t remember writing.”
In order to rectify the situation, Green offered to give his past and future royalties from the poster to Truong. He also addressed the matter in a video on the Vlogbrothers channel:
At its core, this uplifting story is also a warning about the dangers of misattributing quotes on the Internet. Hopefully, Green’s fans will do a quick Ctrl + F next time before assuming a quote came from the pages of his work.
