Turtles All the Way Down

by John Green

I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.

Why didn’t it bother me to slosh through the filthy water of the White River when hours earlier I’d found it intolerable to hear my stomach rumble? I wish I knew.

But the things that make other people nervous have never scared me.

Basically, the state of Indiana doesn’t consider pets people, but it does consider corporations people.

I don’t know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name.

“You often try to understand your experience through metaphor, Aza: It’s like a demon inside of you;

I think and I think and I think.

all my life, I’d been unable to think straight, unable to even finish having a thought because my thoughts came not in lines but in knotted loops curling in upon themselves, in sinking quicksand, in light-swallowing wormholes.

Robert Penn Warren,”

You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.

be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated

He’s trying to treat you like you’re normal and you’re trying to respond like you’re normal

decompensated

“But you give your thoughts too much power, Aza. Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.” “But your thoughts are you. I think therefore I am, right?” “No, not really. A fuller formation of Descartes’s philosophy would be Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. ‘I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.’ Descartes wanted to know if you could really know that anything was real, but he believed his ability to doubt reality proved that, while it might not be real, he was. You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.”

centrifuge.”

I wanted to say more, to find a way to express the magnetic poles of my love for my mother: thank you I’m sorry thank you I’m sorry.

It makes me feel like you only like me at a distance. I need to be liked close up.

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 on the frame.”