Turtles All the Way Down

by John Green

Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.

We are about to live the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else’s misfortune.”

I think you are fairly sung.

I is the hardest word to define.

when you lose someone, you realize you’ll eventually lose everyone.

I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.

Who’s deciding what me means—me or the employees of the factory that makes Lexapro?

let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’

I disgusted myself. I was revolting, but I couldn’t recoil from my self because I was stuck inside of it.

I knew how that felt—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.

I felt certain something was going to kill me, and of course I was right: Something is going to kill you, someday, and you can’t know if this is the day.

But you’re slightly tortured, and the way you’re tortured is sometimes also painful for, like, everyone around you.”

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 booze or God they thought would save them.

It seemed to me that one of the defining features of parents is that they don’t get paid to love you.

You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love. And I wanted to tell him that even though I’d never been in love, I knew what it was like to be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated by it, the way my grandmother talked about God being everywhere. When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it. And I wanted to tell him that the idea of being in a feeling gave language to something I couldn’t describe before,

Reading someone’s poetry is like seeing them naked.” “So I’m basically saying I want to see you naked,” I said.

‘the daffodil knows more of spring / than roses know of anything.’”

I could not cinch the lasso on my thoughts, which were galloping all around my brain.

I couldn’t make myself happy, but I could make people around me miserable.

Every loss is unprecedented. You can’t ever know someone else’s hurt, not really—just like touching someone else’s body isn’t the same as having someone else’s body.

The weather decides when you think about it, not the other way around.

Photographs are just light and time.

“All I want in this world is to keep you. Keep you from hurt, keep you from stress, all that.”

It was cloudy, the kind of day where the sun is a supposition.

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

You’ve just had a successful train of thought, with an engine and a caboose and everything. Your thoughts. Authored by you.

“Jesus Christ, Holmesy, you can sure hold a grudge against yourself.

“Do you feel like you’re getting better?” Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.

love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift.

love is both how you become a person, and why.