Turtles All the Way Down

by John Green

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.

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

You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas.

Sometimes I wondered why she liked me, or at least tolerated me. Why any of them did. Even I found myself annoying.

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

I wanted to say more, but the thoughts kept coming, unbidden and unwanted.

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. You can live a good life without ever knowing real love, of the Corinthians variety, but I was fortunate to have found it with Harold.

because back then all emotions felt like play, like I was experimenting with feeling rather than stuck with it. 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.

Why didn’t it bother me to slosh through the filthy water of the White River when hours earlier I’d found it intolerable to hear my stomach rumble? I wish I knew.

But the things that make other people nervous have never scared me.

I never understood my body—was it scared or excited?

“Whether it hurts is kind of irrelevant.”

And then two or five or six hundred minutes pass before you start to wonder, Wait, did I get all the pus out? Was there pus even or was that only sweat? If it was pus, you might need to drain the wound again. The spiral tightens, like that, forever.

If I die weep at my grave every day until a seedling appears in the dirt, then cry on it to make it grow until it becomes a beautiful tree whose roots surround my body.

“How is he doing, without his father?” “I think he’s okay,” I said. “Most people don’t seem to like their dads much.”

“I don’t mind worriers,” I said. “Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.”

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name.

No one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.

“Life is not something you wield, you know?”

there was something else I couldn’t quite identify, some way-down fear that taking a pill to become myself was wrong.

was thinking about how part of your self can be in a place while at the same time the most important parts are in a different place, a place that can’t be accessed via your senses.

Maybe you are what you can’t not be.

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.

“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.”

I think and I think and I think.

For hours or days, the thoughts would leave me be, and I could remember something my mom told me once: Your now is not your forever. I went to class, got good grades, wrote papers, talked to Mom after lunch, ate dinner, watched television, read. I was not always stuck inside myself, or inside my selves. I wasn’t only crazy.

Dr. Singh told me once that if you have a perfectly tuned guitar and a perfectly tuned violin in the same room, and you pluck the D string of the guitar, then all the way across the room, the D string on the violin will also vibrate. I could always feel my mother’s vibrating strings.

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.

the way he looked at me made me feel like there was something worthwhile in the brown of my eyes, too.

if you can’t pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren’t really real, you know? Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself.”

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

you’re real, but not because of your body or because of your thoughts.”

the senses can’t lie. Or can they?

I thought, It’s happening, the it too terrifying and vast to name with anything but a pronoun.

“The question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.”

“It’s not like that. The sentence doesn’t have, like, an object. I’m just scared.”

I hated hurting her. I hated making her feel helpless. I hated it.

Adults think they’re wielding power, but really power is wielding them.”

I guess at some point, you realize that whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can’t actually protect you from getting hurt.

You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.

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.

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

When the movie ended, I told him I was tired, because that seemed the adjective most likely to get me where I needed to be—alone and in my bed.

You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.”

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.