Turtles All the Way Down

by John Green

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

By cell count, humans are approximately 50 percent microbial, meaning that about half of the cells that make you up are not yours at all.

If I’d been the author, I would’ve stopped thinking about my microbiome.

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

There’s no need to suffer.” Which I’d argue is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the human predicament, but okay.

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.

“One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.”

even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.

“I want to go in tomorrow, totally normal day, and when I draw the short straw and have to get in the Chuckie costume, I just walk off with it. Walk right through the doors, into my brand-new car, take Chuckie home, get him taxidermied, and mount him on the wall like a hunting trophy.”

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

Him: I want to start a fan blog about your ass.

What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.”

part of me wanted to tell him I loved him, but I wasn’t sure if I really did. Our hearts were broken in the same places. That’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.

There was blood. Not a lot, but blood. Faintly pink. It isn’t infected. It bleeds because it hasn’t scabbed over. But it could be. It isn’t. Are you sure? Did you even clean it this morning? Probably. I always clean it. Are you sure? Oh, for fuck’s sake.

I returned to a question Dr. Singh had first asked me years ago, the first time it got this bad: Do you feel like you’re a threat to yourself? But which is the threat and which is the self?

DO YOU WANT TO DIE OF C. DIFF no but this is not rational THEN GET UP AND WHEEL YOUR IV CART TO THE CONTAINER OF HAND SANITIZER MOUNTED ON THE GODDAMNED WALL YOU IDIOT.

Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain.

Dr. Karen Singh liked to say that an unwanted thought was like a car driving past you when you’re standing on the side of the road, and I told myself I didn’t have to get into that car, that my moment of choice was not whether to have the thought, but whether to be carried away by it. And then I got in the car.

IT’S NOT HOW YOU DIE. IT’S WHO YOU DIE.

“Well,” Daisy said after a while, “it all worked out in the end.” “How’s that?” “Our heroes got rich and nobody got hurt.” “Everyone got hurt,” I pointed out. “What I mean is that no one got injured.” “I lacerated my liver!”

I kept checking my phone, waiting for him to reply, but slowly I understood that we were going to be part of each other’s past. I still missed him, though. I missed my dad, too. And Harold. I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.

I thought, lying there, that I might love him for the rest of my life. We did love each other—maybe we never said it, and maybe love was never something we were in, but it was something I felt. I loved him, and I thought, maybe I will never see him again, and I’ll be stuck missing him, and isn’t that so terrible.

The epigraph at the beginning of Turtles All the Way Down is from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “Man can do what he wills / but he cannot will what he wills.” Why is that quote meaningful for you? That’s my experience of being a person. Like, I am not worried about free will; I am worried about my inability to define my will.

In general, I have become much more interested in parents as characters since I became a parent. Like, I used to shuffle all the adults out of my books as quickly as possible. And now I’m like, “Hold on. Let’s listen to your mother for a minute. She might have a point here.”