John Green - Paper Towns (2008)

101 Sourced Quotes

View all John Green Quotes
Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.

John Green
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
I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well—but never quite perfectly, you know?

John Green
Maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships 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. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the 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.

John Green
Ben Starling, you better not have bought your token black friend a racist shirt

John Green
What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.

John Green
I kept waiting for that loneliness and nervousness to make me want to go back. But it never did.

John Green
Yeah, so if that guy can make it in drunk, surely we can make it in sober. I mean, we're ninjas.' 'Well, maybe you're a ninja,' I said. 'You're just a really loud, awkward ninja,' Margo said, 'but we are both ninjas.

John Green
The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all.

John Green
That's always seemed so 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
Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.

John Green
But as for me: I must ask the wounded man where he is hurt, because I cannot become the wounded man. The only wounded man I can be is me.

John Green
"It's a penis," Margo said, "in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state: it may have an illustrious history, but it sure isn't big."

John Green
I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.

John Green
The preciousness of the moment, which should make it easier to talk, makes it harder.

John Green
In the end, I had to call myself a faggot, which really annoyed me, because 1. I don't think that word should ever be used by anyone, let alone me, and 2. As it happens, I am not gay, and furthermore, 3. Chuck Parson made it out like calling yourself a faggot was the ultimate humiliation, even though there's nothing at all embarrassing about being gay.

John Green
Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.

John Green
"The thing about That Guy Is a Gigolo," Radar says, "I mean, the thing about it as a game, is that in the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined."

John Green
As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.

John Green
You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town.

John Green
She had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with your own.

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