Paper Towns Quotes

I spent the next three hours in classrooms, trying not to look at the clocks over various blackboards, and then looking at the clocks, and then being amazed that only a few minutes had passed since I last looked at the clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight for the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.

~ John Green

pg. 231-232: They'd given me a minivan. They could have picked any car and they picked a minivan. A minivan. O God of the Vehicular Justice, why dost thou mock me? Minivan, you albatross around my neck! You mark of Cain! You wretched beast high ceilings and few horsepower!

~ John Green

Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington’s house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

~ John Green

Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music.

~ John Green

She loved so much misteries tha she became one

~ John Green

A poem can't do its work if you only read snippets of it.

~ John Green

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.

~ John Green

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.

~ John Green

I think the future deserves our faith. But it is hard to argue with Emily Dickinson.

~ John Green

But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all. Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo's anger at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in.

~ John Green

We bring the fucking rain Q, not the scattered showers.

~ John Green

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

~ John Green

I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?

~ John Green

On some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are.

~ John Green

. . . I'm not pretty, not close up anyway. Generally, the closer people get to me the less hot they find me.

~ Margo Roth Spiegelman

It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she'd left for me.

~ John Green

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

~ John Green