John Green - Paper Towns (2008)

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It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing unattainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness wh's kind of bossy—then I had to basically start liking a while different person.

John Green
On the morning in question, she wore white shorts and a pink T-shirt that featured a green dragon breathing a fire of orange glitter. It is difficult to explain how awesome I found this T-shirt at the time.

John Green
Well, but you can eat Grandma's cookies. They're not bad for you. They were made by Grandma. Grandma wouldn't hurt you.

John Green
If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.

John Green
I feel like I might start crying and that I'm going to cry pee.

John Green
You can't divorce Margo the person from Margo the body. You can't see one without seeing the other. You looked at Margo's eyes and you saw both their blueness and their Margo-ness. In the end, you could not say that Margo Roth Spiegelman was fat, or that she was skinny, any more than you can say that the Eiffel Tower is or is not lonely. Margo's beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection – uncracked and uncrackable.

John Green
I have never really thought of him as a person, either.... A guy whose strings were broken, who didn't feel the root of his leaves of grass connected to the field, a guy who was cracked. Like me.

John Green
I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself to train my body for real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.

John Green
Nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.

John Green
I didn't need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.

John Green
I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.

John Green
Radar threw his books into his locker and shut it. Then the din of conversation around us quieted just a bit as he turned his eyes toward the heavens and shouted, "IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD'S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.

John Green
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.

John Green
The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, 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.

John Green
Lacey shrugged bashfully. Do you think I'm superficial? Well, yeah. I thought of myself standing outside Becca's bedroom, hoping she'd take her shirt off. But so am I, I added. So is everyone.

John Green
I mean, he was something that happened to me, you know? But before he was this minor figure in the drama of my life he was - you know, the central figure in the drama of his own life.

John Green
She called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy.

John Green
You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves.

John Green
She raised one leg and gave me all her weight as a I dipped her. She either trusted me or wanted to fall.

John Green
It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

John Green
Whatever, bro. We both had a long day. Too much drama. I'll TTYS." I wanted to ridicule him for using chatspeak IRL, but I found myself lacking the energy.

John Green
For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

John Green
Augustus, perhaps you'd like to share your fears with the group. My fears? Yes. I fear oblivion, he said without a moment's pause. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark. Too soon, Isaac said, cracking a smile. Was that insensitive? Augustus asked. I can be pretty blind to other people's feelings.

John Green
You had been a paper boy to me all these years - two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real.

John Green
It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.

John Green
It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

John Green
To be abandoned like that! Shut out when you most need to be loved.

John Green
Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington's house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

John Green
And since she drove to work every morning, I could only use the car on weekends. Well, weekends and the middle of the goddamned night.

John Green
Bro, it's dark. You can't go to a strange building with a mysterious address in the dark. Haven't you ever seen a horror movie?

John Green