Turtles All the Way Down

by John Green

The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.

she doesn’t remind me of the past, for some reason. She feels present tense.

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

In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt.

I was a story riddled with plot holes.

I was still at the beginning. I could still be anybody.

“The problem with happy endings,” I said, “is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.”

You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don’t choose what’s in the picture, but you decide on the frame.”

I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.

You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.

I, a singular proper noun, would go on, if always in a conditional tense.

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