"What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"The town was paper, but the memories were not."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"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."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"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."
— John Green

""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.'""
— John Green

"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."
— John Green

"We're not going to break anything. Don't think of it as breaking in to SeaWorld. Think of it as visiting SeaWorld in the middle of the night for free."
— John Green

""I shaved this morning for precisely that reason. I was like, 'Well, you never know when someone is going to clamp down on your calf and try to suck out the snake poison.""
— John Green

"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."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"Those of us who frequent the band room have long suspected that Becca maintains her lovely figure by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and dreams of impoverished children."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"We bring the fucking rain Q, not the scattered showers."
— John Green

"Margo glanced at her watch and help up two fingers. We waited. And for those two minutes we just stared at each other, and I watched the blue in her eyes. It was nice--in the dark and the quiet, with no possibility of me saying anything to screw it up, and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"Was it animal pee or human pee? Someone asked.
How would I know? What, am I an expert in the study of pee?"
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"Margo glanced at her watch and held up two fingers. We waited. And for those two minutes we just stared at each other, and I watched the blue in her eyes. It was nice--in the dark and the quiet, with no possibility of me saying anything to screw it up, and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"You were with Margo Roth Spiegelman last night? At THREE A.M.? I nodded. Alone? I nodded. Oh my God, if you hooked up with her, you have to tell me every single thing that happened. You have to write me a term paper on the look and feel of Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts. Thrity pages, minimum! I want you to do a photo-realistic pencil drawing. A sculpture would also be acceptable. I was wondering if it would be possible for you to write a sestina about Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts? Your six words are: pink, round, firmness, succulent, supple, and pillowy. Personally, I think at least one of the words should be buhbuhbuhbuh."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"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."
— John Green

"Remember that time in the minivan, twenty minutes ago, when we didn't die?"
— John Green

"By the power of the superglue beer sword, I designate you my driver!"
— John Green

"We imagine people as animals or gods. -But she was just a person, a girl."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"Having spent a long time in open spaces, whether sea or desert, it is a luxury to be able to take refuge in towns with narrow streets which provide a fragile fortress against the assaults of the infinite. There is such a sense of security against the boundless there, even if the murmur of the wave or the silence of the sands still pursue one through tortuous corridors. The winds, despite their subtle spirits, are themselves lost in the vestibules of this labyrinth and, unable to find a way through, whistle and turn in turbulence like demented dervishes. They will not break through the walls of this den in which life still pulsates in the shadows of humanity's black sun."
— Georges Limbour

"But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop."
— John Green