Recognizable Quotes

“I feel like I might not be driving the bus of my consciousness," I said.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Him: Then what am I? What is anyone?
Her: I is the hardest word to define.
Him: Maybe you are what you can't not be.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Once I start thinking about splitting the skin apart, I literally cannot not do it. I apologize for the double negative, but it's a real double negative of a situation, a bind from which negating the negation is truly the only escape.
The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“The way he talked about thoughts was the way I experienced them - not as a choice but as a destiny. Not a catalog of my consciousness, but a refutation of it.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“There are something like a thousand times more microbes living in my particular biome than there are human beings on earth, and it often seems like I can feel them living and breeding and dying in and on me.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“If taking a pill makes you different, like, if it changes the way-down you ... that's just a screwed-up idea, you know? Who's deciding what me means - me or the employees of the factory that makes Lexapro? It's like I have this demon inside of me, and I want it gond, but the idea of removing it via pill is ... I don't know ... weird. But a lot of days I get over that, because I do really hate the demon.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“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.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“One of the challenges with pain - physical of
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.
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.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“My stomach really hurt now, like it was twisting in on itself, like the trillions of bacteria within me were making room for a new species in town, the one that would rip me apart from the inside out.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Honey: I know these people ...”
― Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?