Paper Towns

24 'Paper Towns' Quotes To Remind You That Love Is An Illusion But Friendship Is The Real Deal

This is why they don't let you rent a car until you're 25. 
Heidi Priebe
October 26, 2016
“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Leaving, Saying Goodbye, goodbye, Endings, Ending
“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: People, Relationships, Idealizing People, Putting People On A Pedestal
“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 planning. 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.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Life, Life Span, Future, Future Plans
“I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Love, Relationships, Choices
“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.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Love, Relationships, Friendship, vulnerability
“It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: People, humanity, Imagination, Perceptions, Putting Someone On A Pedestal
“As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Death, Stories, Adventure
“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.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: People, humanity, Idealization, Connection, Imperfection, Disillusionment
“You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Idealizing People, INFP, ENFP, Relationships, People, Perception, Reality
“She loved mysteries so much that she became one.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Mysteries, Women, mysterious
“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.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Miracles, Likelihood, Science
“Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Illusion, Imagination, Reality, Perception
“Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Relationships, Idealizing People, Putting Yourself First
“Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Leaving, Roots, Community, Significance, Saying Goodbye, Starting Over
“This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Life, Adventure
“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, Paper Towns
Tagged: Leaving, travel, Change, Variety
“I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Hometown
“Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will… but then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Imagination, Idealism, Life
“How can you separate those things though? The people are the place is the people.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: People, Places, Nostalgia, Memory
“Forever is comprised of nows.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Forever, The future, The Present
“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.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Life, Imagination, Reality
“Everything's uglier close up.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Reality, Idealizing People
“Even with everything broken and decided inside her she couldn't quite allow herself to disappear for good.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Leaving, Change, Roots
“You have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.”
— John Green, Paper Towns
Tagged: Metaphors, Writing, Words, Thoughts