Turtles All the Way Down

by John Green

‘Ladies and gentlemen and also people who do not identify as ladies or gentlemen,

“Welcome to the future, Holmesy. It’s not about hacking computers anymore; it’s about hacking human souls.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum (“Don’t let the bastards get you down,”

Thats in the handmaids tale

“I feel like I might not be driving the bus of my consciousness,” I said. “Not in control,” she said. “I guess.”

“Okay, well, I feel more like seven things than one thing.”

Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache …. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’ And 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. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.”

I think, You will never be free from this. I think, You don’t pick your thoughts. I think, You are dying, and there are bugs inside of you that will eat through your skin. I think and I think and I think.

I tried to smile and shake my head at the right times, but I was always a moment behind the rest of them. They laughed because something was funny; I laughed because they had.

I was ready to go home, eat something in private, and go to sleep.

I see myself in aza

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.

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

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

“Are you crying about the car?”

It is her dead dads car. I would cry too

I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me. My self and the disease were knotted together for life.