John Green’s “Paper Towns” Quotes (89 Quotes)


    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.

    Maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them.

    That doesn't sound like my Margo", she said, and I thought of my Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different funhouse mirrors.





    In the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to.


    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.


    A small olive-skinned creature who had hit puberty but never hit it very hard, Ben had been my best friend since fifth grade, when we both finally owned up to the fact that neither of us was likely to attract anyone else as a best friend.

    Dude, I don't want to talk about Lacey's prom shoes. And I'll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It's called a penis.

    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.

    Maybe we're grass-our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive.


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

    And I can't help but feel that Whitman, for all his blustering beauty, might have been just a bit too optimistic. We can hear others, and we can travel to them without moving, and we can imagine them, and we are all connected one to the other by a crazy root system like so many leaves of grass - but the game makes me wonder whether we can really ever fully become one another.

    Even with everything broken and decided inside her she couldn't quite allow herself to disappear for good.

    Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.

    My days had a pleasant identicalness about them. I had always liked that: I liked routine. I liked being bored. I didn't want to but I did.


    Well, she's not your daughter,Connie. She hasn't walked all over you like a doormat for a decade.

    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.

    High school is neither a democracy nor a dictatorship - nor, contrary to popular belief, an anarchic state. High school is a divine-right monarchy. And when the queen goes on vacation, things change.

    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.

    My parents always liked it when I cursed in front of them. I could see the pleasure of it in their faces. It signified that I trusted them, that I was myself in front of them.





    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.


    The sky is like a monochromatic contemporay painting, drawing me in its illusion of depth, pulling me up.




    It was nice - in the dark and the quiet... and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing.






    It's all very dramatic and everything, but so what? I didn't know the guy. People I don't know die all the damned time.

    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.


    Your party kicked so much ass!Even though you suck so much! It's like, instead of blood, your heart pumps liquid suck! But thanks for the beer!


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

    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.



    More John Green Quotations (Based on Topics)


    People - Time - World - Education - Mind - Death & Dying - Thought & Thinking - Life - Pain - Facts - Business & Commerce - Belief & Faith - Suffering - Place - Books - Conservative - Nature - Sense & Perception - Light - View All John Green Quotations

    More John Green Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - Looking for Alaska
    - Paper Towns
    - The Fault in Our Stars

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