Quotes from Turtles All the Way Down

“Your now is not your forever.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“We never really talked much or even looked at each other, but it didn't matter because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe even more intimate than eye contact anyway. I mean, anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“Anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“...no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice on the matter.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“The problem with happy endings is that they're either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how and you become a person and why.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“Actually, the problem is that I can't lose my mind," I said. "It's inescapable.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“What I love about science is that as you learn, you don't really get answers. You just get better questions.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“To be alive is to be missing.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“No, it's not, Holmesy. You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don't choose what's in the picture, but you decide the frame.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“One of the challenges with pain--physical or psychic--is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can't be represented the way table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“If only I were as good at life as I am at the internet.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“I is the hardest word to define.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“Our hearts were broken in the same places. That's something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“Whether it hurts is kind of irrelevant.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“And we're such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn't real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracise and minimise. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“Most adults are just hollowed out. You watch them try to fill themselves up with booze or money or God or fame or whatever they worship, and it all rots them from the inside until nothing is left but the money or the booze or God they though would save them. Adults think they are wielding power, but really power is wielding them.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“We always say we are beneath the stars. We aren't, of course—there is no up or down, and anyway the stars surround us. But we say we are beneath them, which is nice. So often English glorifies the human—we are whos, other animals are that—but English puts us beneath the stars, at least.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

“There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn't.”
― John Green, quote from Turtles All the Way Down

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Popular quotes

“It was Hitler’s style, his oratorical talents and his remarkable ability to transmit emotions and feelings in his speeches, that took him to the leadership of the ragtag party of misfits and adventurers that he joined in Munich in 1919 and that called itself the German Workers’ Party. The ideas he and the party spouted were all tattered; they were nothing but jargon inherited from the paranoid Austro-German border politics of the pre-1914 era, which saw “Germanness” threatened with inundation by “subject nationalities.” Even the combination “national socialist,” which Hitler added to the party’s name when he became leader in 1920, was borrowed from the same era and same sources. It was not the substance—there was no substance to the frantic neurotic tirades—that allowed the party to survive and later to grow. It was the style and the mood. It was above all the theater, the vulgar “art,” the grand guignol productions of the beer halls and the street.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

“There's no way that can be the river," Rhiow said.
"Rhi, the ceiling of Grand Central--" Saash said.
"It's backward," Rhiow snapped, "thank you very much, I know all about it."
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Rhiow closed her mouth and thought about that.”
― Diane Duane, quote from The Book of Night with Moon

“He was absurd to the point of inspiration.”
― Joseph Conrad, quote from The Nigger of the Narcissus

“His perpetual grin was wider than any I'd ever seen, and that included several guys I'd known at Dreadgrave's with no skin on their faces.”
― Yahtzee Croshaw, quote from Mogworld

“Well, did anything interesting happen today?' [my father] would begin. And even before the daily question was completed I had eagerly launched into my narrative of every play, and almost every pitch, of that afternoon's contest. It never crossed my mind to wonder if, at the close of a day's work, he might find my lengthy account the least bit tedious. For there was mastery as well as pleasure in our nightly ritual. Through my knowledge, I commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, quote from Wait Till Next Year

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