From Margo To Quentin – The Best Paper Towns Quotes

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.

Maybe its like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen – these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack in places. And I mean, yeah once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And its only that time that we see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.

Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is actually used to cut diamonds,” I added. Radar tapped a locker twice with his fist to show his approval, and then came back with another. “ben, getting you a date to prom is so hard that the american government believes the problem cannot be solved with diplomacy, but will instead require force.

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

Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? you could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? there was no planning for retirement, there was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. 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.

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?.

It’s more impressive,” I said out loud. “from a distance, I mean. You can’t see the wear on things, you know? you can’t see the rust or the weeds or the paint cracking. You see the place as someone once imagined it.

It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

We bring the f*cking rain q, not the scattered showers.

Tonight, darling, we are going to right a lot of wrongs. And we are going to wrong some rights. The first shall be last; the last shall be first; the meek shall do some earth-inheriting. But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.

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

At some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too.

The thing is that I do believe in college, and jobs, and maybe even babies one day. I believe in the future. Maybe it’s a character flaw, but for me it is a congenital one.

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

Here’s what’
s not beautiful about it: from here, you can’t see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town. I mean, look at it,
q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.

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

Do you guys remember that one time, in the minivan, twenty minutes ago, that we somehow didn’t die?.

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

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.

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

The fundamental mistake I had always made – and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make – was this: margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

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.

And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn’t planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together.

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.

Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.

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

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

The town was paper, but the memories were not.

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.

Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.

You know your problem, quentin? you keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than margo roth spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me about how it’s going with my girlfriend – but I don’t give a sh*t, man, because you’re you. My parents have a sh*t ton of black santas, but that’s okay. They’re them. I’m too obsessed with a reference website to answer my phone sometimes when my friends call, or my girlfriend. That’s okay, too. That’s me. You like me anyway. And I like you. You’re funny, and you’re smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually.

By the power of the superglue beer sword, I designate you my driver!.

Poetry is just so emo.” he said. “oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, 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.

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

Just deleting vandalism on the chuck norris page,” radar said. “for instance, while I do think that chuck norris specializes in the roundhouse kick, I don’t think it’s accurate to say, ‘chuck norris’s tears can cure cancer, but unfortunately he has never cried.

A margo for each of us–and each more mirror than window.

If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.

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!.

Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.

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

Maybe all the strings inside him broke.

The last time I was this scared, I peed myself.”
“the last time I was this scared,” radar says, “i actually had to face a dark lord in order to make the world safe for wizards.

I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.

I have never really thought of him as a person, either…. A guy whose strings were broken, who didn’t feel the root of his leaves of grass connected to the field, a guy who was cracked. Like me.

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.

Remember that time in the minivan, twenty minutes ago, when we didn’t die?.

And all at once I knew how margo roth spiegelman felt when she wasn’
t being margo roth spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the unscaleable wall surrounding her. I thought of her asleep on the carpet with only that jagged sliver of sky above her.
Maybe margo felt comfortable there because margo the person lived like that all the time: in an abandoned room with blocked-out windows, the only light pouring in through holes in the roof. Yes. The fundamental mistake I had always made—and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make—
was this: margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

I’m starting to realize that people lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, & so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.

When did we see each other face-to-face? not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.

I spy with my little eye a great story.

My heart is really pounding,” I said.
“that’s how you know you’re having fun,” margo said.

It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

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.