Paper Towns Quotes

“Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is actually used to cut diamonds," I added. Radar tapped a locker twice with his fist to show his approval, and then came back with another. "Ben, getting you a date to prom is so hard that the American government believes the problem cannot be solved with diplomacy, but will instead require force.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“When I've thought about him dying - which admittedly isn't that much - I always thought of it like you said, that all strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships think, or maybe we're grass - our roots are so interdependent that no one is dead as long as soneone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications...
I like the strings, I always have. Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is...We are not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well- but not quite perfectly, you know?
"Maybe, it's more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen-these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable...But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it's only in that time that we can see each other, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never looking inside. But once the vessel cracks, the like can get in. The like can get out.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“As far as I can tell, there are two basic (kissing) rules: 1. Don't bite anything without permission. 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful, and should be used sparingly.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“I spy with my little eye a great story.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“We imagine people as animals or gods. -But she was just a person, a girl.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“I can almost imagine a happiness without her, the ability to let her go, to feel our roots are connected even if I never see that leaf of grass again.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“I kept waiting for that loneliness and nervousness to make me want to go back. But it never did.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Listen, kid. This is what happens: Somebody-girl usually-got a free spirit, doesn't get on too good with her parents. These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just fly away. And maybe you never see the balloon again. It lands in Canada or somethin', gets work at a restaurant, and before the balloon even notices, it's been pouring coffee in that same dinner to the same sad bastards for thirty years. Or maybe three or four years from now or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home, because it needs money, or it sobered up, or it misses its kid brother. But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time."
"Yeah, bu-"

"I'm not finished, kid. The thing about these balloons is that there are so goddamned many of them. The sky is choked full of them, rubbing up against one another as they float to here or from there, and every one of those damned balloons ends up on my desk, one way or another, and after awhile a man can get discouraged. Everywhere the balloons, and each of them with a mother and father, or God forbid both, and after a while, you can't even see'em individually. You look up at all the balloons in the sky and you can see all of the balloons, but you cannot see any one balloon.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“At least I carpe'd that one diem.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“The last time I was this scared, I peed myself."
"The last time I was this scared," Radar says, "I actually had to face a Dark Lord in order to make the world safe for wizards.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“A Margo for each of us--and each more mirror than window.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Imagine others complexly.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“I felt tired for the first time, and I thought of us lying down on some grassy patch of SeaWorld together, me on my back and she on her side with her arm draped against me, her head on my shoulder, facing me. Not doing anything—just lying there together beneath the sky, the night here so well lit that it drowns out the stars. And maybe I could feel her breathe against my neck, and maybe we could just stay there until morning and then the people would walk past us as they came into the park, and they would see us and think that we were tourists, too, and we could just disappear into them.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“You just gotta tell her, man,’ I said. ‘You just gotta say, “Angela, I really like you, but there’s something you need to know: when we go to my house and hook up, we’ll be watched by the twenty-four hundred eyes of twelve hundred black Santas.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Q, you're going to go to Duke. You're going to be a very successful lawyer-or-something and get married and have babies and live your whole little life, and then you're going to die, and in the last moments, when you're chocking on your own bile in the nursing home, you'll say to yourself:'Well, I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman my senior year of high school. At least I carpe'd that one diem.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“But I was not in the band, because I suffer from the kind of tone deafness that is generally associated with actual deafness”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“How can you seperate those things though? The people are the place is the people.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“I know it's impossible for you to see your peers this way, but when you're older, you start to see them--the bad kids and the good kids and all kids--as people. They're just people, who deserve to be cared for.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ship s sink, or maybe we're grass--our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“She had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with your own.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“It always seemed ridiculous to me that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Interesting capitalization,' I said.
'Yeah. I'm a big believer in random capitalization. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Chuck Parson did not participate in organized sports, because to do so would distract from his larger goal of his life: to one day be convicted of murder”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Everything's uglier close up," she said.
"Not you," I answered.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“She is close enough to me that I can see her, because even now there is the outward sign of visible light, even at night in this parking lot on the outskirts of Algoe. After we kiss, our foreheads touch as we stare at each other. Yes, I can see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness.”
― John Green, Paper Towns