John Green/ Paper Towns

“How can you seperate those things though? The people are the place is the people.”

“I am thinking that I don't want this to happen. I don't want to die. I don't want my friends to die. And to be honest, as the time slows down and my hands are in the air, I am afforded the chance to think one more thought, and I think about her. I blame her for this ridiculous, fatal chase--for putting us at risk, for making me into the kind of jackass who would stay up all night and drive too fast. I would not be dying were it not for her. I would have stayed home, as I have always stayed home, and I would've been safe, and I would have done the one thing I have always wanted to do, which is to grow up.”

“But I had to kill you, because the only other possible ending was us doing it, which I wasn't really emotionally ready to write about at ten.'

'Fair enough,' I say. 'But in the revision, I want to get some action.”

“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.”

“But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.”

“It was a lame string, for sure, but it was the one I had left and every paper girl needs at least one string, right? ”

“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.”

“You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and your hear all the terrible and woderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to.”

“The way you think about a person isn't the way they actually are.”

“It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing attainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who's kinda bossy, then I had to basically start liking a whole different person.”

“I looked down and thought about how I was made of paper. I was the flimsy-foldable person, not everyone else.”

“I always like routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring”

“People I don't know die all the time. If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.”

“The town was paper, but the memories were not”

“It is so hard to leave-until you leave.”

“It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel”

“I feel like I might start crying and that I'm going to cry pee.”

"I'm a big believer in random capitalization. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to the words in the middle. ”

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

“The pleasure isn't in doing the thing; the pleasure is in planning it.”

“i'd been in the dark so long I was still craving it.”

“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.”

“Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.”