John Green - Paper Towns (2008)

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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
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
Lacey takes the bar from me and reluctantly bites into it. She has to close her eyes to hide the orgasmic pleasure inherent in GoFast-tasting. "Oh. My. God. That tastes like hope feels."

John Green
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
And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future—you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.

John Green
This was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die."- Paper Towns

John Green
There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that's one in five... so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.

John Green
And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I'd done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me.

John Green
Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn't the way they actually are… People are different when you can smell them and see them up close…

John Green
I shaved this morning for precisely that reason. I was like, 'Well, you never know when someone is going to clamp down on your calf and try to suck out the snake poison.

John Green
Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future.

John Green
I will play out the string. I will not betray your trust. I will find you.

John Green
And I don't really have anyone upon whom I want to rain down my wrath," I said, because in truth I didn't. I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies. Example: Historically, Germany has had more enemies than Luxembourg, Margo Roth Spiegelman was Germany. And Great Britain. And the United States. And czarist Russia. Me, I'm Luxembourg. Just sitting around, tending sheep, and yodeling.

John Green
I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.

John Green
He just waited until I stopped talking and said, 'Jesus, kid, you're almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what's your theory?

John Green