Turtles All the Way Down

by John Green

But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.

The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.

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

I don’t like to throw the L-word around; it’s too good and rare a feeling to cheapen with overuse.

True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.

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

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

being mentally unwell doesn’t make you loftily intelligent any more than having the flu does. So I know I should’ve been a brilliant detective or whatever, but in actuality I was one of the least observant people I’d ever met.

“You’re so stuck in your head,” she continued. “It’s like you genuinely can’t think about anyone else.” I felt like I was getting smaller. “I’m sorry, Holmesy, I shouldn’t say that. It’s just frustrating sometimes.” When I didn’t respond, she kept talking. “I don’t mean that you’re a bad friend or anything. But you’re slightly tortured, and the way you’re tortured is sometimes also painful for, like, everyone around you.”

“I’m sorry.” “You say that a lot.” “I feel it a lot.”

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.

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.

Our hearts were broken in the same places. That’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.