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

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.

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.

The pleasure isn't in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it.

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

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

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

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.

The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.

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

As much as life can suck, it always beats the alternative.

I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies.

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.

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

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

When you leave a place, it's best to leave.

Before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard.

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

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

People are different when you can smell them and look up close, you know?

The town was paper, but the memories were not.

You can learn a lot about government from donkey balls.

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

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

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.

The true ninja doesn't make a splash at all.

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!

Ben's tongue is like sunscreen...It's good for your health and should be applied liberally.

I know it's impossible for you to see your peers this way, but when you're older, you start to see them--the bad kids and the good kids and all kids--as people. They're just people, who deserve to be cared for.

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.

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

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.

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.

I smiled. She smiled. I believed the smile.

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

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.

This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.