Turtles All the Way Down

by John Green

My stomach was kind of churning, but I couldn’t tell why. I never understood my body—was it scared or excited?

But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all the other thoughts until it’s the only one you’re able to have,

Since you’ve had a reasonable amount of cognitive behavioral therapy, you tell yourself, I am not my thoughts, even though deep down you’re not sure what exactly that makes you.

click a little x in the top corner of the thought to make it go away. And maybe it does for a moment; you’re back in your house, on the couch, next to your mom, and then your brain says, Well, but wait. What if your finger is infected? Why not just check? The cafeteria wasn’t exactly the most sanitary place to reopen that wound. And then you were in the river.

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” —WILLIAM JAMES I don’t know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“I feel like I might not be driving the bus of my consciousness,”

if you can be something to your self, then your self isn’t, like, singular.”

In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.”

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.

I think and I think and I think.

This was not normal. Then again, didn’t it always feel different? No, this felt different from the other differents.

“You feeling scared?” “Kinda.” “Of what?” “It’s not like that. The sentence doesn’t have, like, an object. I’m just scared.”

There are so many gold nugget quotes in this book and this is absolutely one of them

When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it.

I wanted out—out of my body, out of my thoughts, out—but I was stuck inside of this thing,

Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. ‘I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I

My brain was quiet now that I’d done the thing it wanted me to do,

Life is a series of choices between wonders.

Please just let me out. Whoever is authoring me, let me up out of this. Anything to be out of this.

probably spend a good portion of the workday terrorized by thoughts I’m forced to think, possessed by a nameless and formless demon,

Thoughts are just a different kind of bacteria, colonizing you.