1. “Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.”
2. “What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
3. “I’d been in the dark so long I was still craving it, and I just wanted to lie down somewhere halfway quiet and halfway dark.”
4. “As long as we don’t die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.”
5. “The town was paper, but the memories were not.”
6. “She’s just doing Margo stuff. Making stories. Rocking worlds.”
7. “I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn’t planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together – but that seemed to cheesy to say, and anyway, she was standing up.”
8. “Your friendship with her-it sleeps with the fishes.”
9. “There are many people. It is easy to forget how crowded the world is, crowded, and each of them is liable to be imagined and, therefore, to imagine it badly.”
10. “It’s easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”
11. “It’s not poetry. It’s not metaphor. It’s instructions.”
12. “Because no one thought she was a person, she had no one to really talk to.”
13. “We’re just going to go to SeaWorld, that’s all. It’s the only theme park I haven’t broken into yet.”
14. “I suppose that each one has his miracle.”
15. “It is difficult to explain how awesome I found this T-shirt at the time.”
16. “Please stop,” I said. “You’re upsetting the black Santas.”
17. “I’m starting to realize that people lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, & so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.”
18. “People I don’t know die all the damned time. If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I’d be crazier than a shithouse rat.”
19. “This was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories.”
20. “For pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for planning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future.”
21. “How can you seperate those things though? The people are the place is the people.”
22. “That line was from, but a couple of the parts I did read got stuck in my head.”
23. “maintains her lovely figure by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished”
24. “Nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.”
25. “It all seemed so trivial,so embarassing.It all seemed like paper kids having their paper fun.”
26. “Because it’s kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way.”
27. “We bring the fucking rain, Q. Not the scattered showers.”
28. “Every moment of your life is lived for the future—you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.”
29. “I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies.”
30. “We imagine people as animals or gods. -But she was just a person, a girl.”
31. “But I was not in the band, because I suffer from the kind of tone deafness that is generally associated with actual deafness”
32. “I already picked a punishment. Now you just pick who we’re going to rain our mighty wrath down on.”
33. “I and this mystery here we stand.”
34. “I spy with my little eye a hero’s heart, a heart that beats not for itself but for all humanity.”
35. “What about the rest of your life?”
She shrugged. “What about it?”
“Aren’t you worried about, like, forever?”
“Forever is composed of nows,” she says.
36. “The last time I stand in a circle outside the band room in the shade of this oak tree that has protected generations of band geeks.”
37. “The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.”
38. “I wonder if [Margo] created this journey for us on purpose or by accident—regardless, it’s the most fun I’ve had since the last time I spent hours behind the wheel of a minivan.”
39. “My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.”
40. “This had better be one extraordinary well-stocked BP station, because we are going to clear the bitch out.”
41. “I seemed to be the first person to walk on these unnamed dirt streets in years.”
42. “If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”
43. “Sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are”
44. “About the future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future—you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.”
45. “I’d been in the dark so long I was still craving it, and I just wanted to lie down somewhere halfway quiet and halfway dark and go back to imagining Margo.”
46. “And I imagined her at this party, or at thousands like this one.”
47. “Maybe all the strings inside him broke.”
48. “I always like routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring.”
49. “[Margo] wore white shorts and a pink T-shirt that featured a green dragon breathing a fire of orange glitter. It is difficult to explain how awesome I found this T-shirt at the time.”
50. “I think the future deserves our faith. But it is hard to argue with Emily Dickinson.”
51. “Do you guys remember that one time, in the minivan, twenty minutes ago, that we somehow didn’t die?”
52. “He has a singular obsession.”
53. “When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
54. “I looked down and thought I was paper.”
55. “Yes, I can see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness.”
56. “I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?”
57. “This would be the perfect place to sleep: one could see the stars at night without getting rained on.”
58. “As I took those two steps back, Margo took two equally small and quiet steps forward.”
59. “This raw pleasure was worth all the worry that preceded it.”
60. “I kept waiting for that loneliness and nervousness to make me want to go back. But it never did.”
61. “It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them.”
62. “Isn’t it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”
63. “I do think there are some interesting connections between the poet in ‘Song of Myself’ and Margo Roth Spiegelman—all that wild charisma and wanderlust.”
64. “Last day of school for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all”
65. “Such was life that morning: nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.”
66. “To be abandoned like that! Shut out when you most need to be loved.”
67. “That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.”
68. “I didn’t really look down and think about how everything was made of paper. I looked down and thought about how I was made of paper.”
69. “Light, the visible reminder of Invisible Light.”
70. “I couldn’t help but hope that Margo Roth Spiegelman would return to my window and drag my tired ass through one more night I’d never forget.”
71. “this girl who was an idea that I loved.”
72. “So maybe we won’t ever win the lottery, or marry royalty, or make that last second shot. That doesn’t mean we won’t have amazing adventures, meet exceptional people, and make indelible memories. The trick is to notice before it’s too late.”
73. “When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours.”
74. “I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.” Now she looked at me. “And that’s like a promise. At least for tonight.”
75. “I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It’s called a penis.”
76. “When I’ve thought about him dying — which admittedly isn’t that much — I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass — our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean? ”
77. “Margo’s beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection–uncracked and uncrackable.”
78. “I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.”
79. “I never know you until i got to know you through your clues.I like clues more than I like you.”
80. “She is close enough to me that I can see her, because even now there is the outward sign of visible light, even at night in this parking lot on the outskirts of Algoe. After we kiss, our foreheads touch as we stare at each other. Yes, I can see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness.”
81. “Just remember that sometimes the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.”
82. “I looked down and thought about how I was made of paper. I was the flimsy-foldable person, not everyone else.”
83. “As we walked, I kept taking glances at her through the crowd, quick snapshots: a photographic series entitled Perfection Stands Still While Mortals Walk Past.”
84. “Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”
85. “I set my alarm for the ungodly hours of six in the morning, and spent the next few hours trying in vain to fall asleep.”
86. “She loved mysteries so much that she became one.”
87. “To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman.”
88. “I honestly never thought of her as anything but my crazy beautiful friend who does all the crazy beautiful things.”
89. “I don’t know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.”
90. “She’s not dead. She’s a drama queen. Wants attention.”
91. “I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen.”
92. “I left the only way you can leave. You pull your life off all at once – like a Band-Aid.”
93. “Paper Towns for a Paper Girl, who wants to think and read clearly”
94. “Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.”
95. “I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.”
96. “I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”
97. “No, I love you. Not like a sister loves a brother or like a friend loves a friend. I love you like a really drunk guy loves the best girl ever”
98. “I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington’s house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basis of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us burn our dead.”
99. “Imagine others complexly.”
100. “Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.”
101. “I will play out the string. I will not betray your trust. I will find you.”
102. “You will go to the paper towns and you will never come back.”
103. “I picked you. And then you picked me back.”
104. “I said nothing again. I just wanted her to keep talking – that small voice tense with the excitement of almost knowing things, making me feel like something important was happening to me.”
105. “I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”
106. “Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future.”
107. “Those of us who frequent the band room have long suspected that Becca maintains her lovely figure by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished children.”
108. “It must be said that Lacey Pemberton was very beautiful. She was not the kind of girl who could make your forget about Margo Roth Spiegelman, but she was the kind of girl who could make you forget about a lot of things.”
109. “I know it’s impossible for you to see your peers this way, but when you’re older, you start to see them–the bad kids and the good kids and all kids–as people. They’re just people, who deserve to be cared for.”
110. “It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world. As I ran, I felt myself for the first time”
111. “It’s a paper town. Paper houses and paper people.”
112. “In your last moments […] you’ll say to yourself: ‘Well, I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman my senior year of high school. At least I carpe’d that one diem.‘”
113. “Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.”
114. “I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”
115. “Because if it doesn’t happen to you, it doesn’t happen at all.”
116. “Well, but you can eat Grandma’s cookies. They’re not bad for you. They were made by Grandma. Grandma wouldn’t hurt you.”
117. “I’m a big believer in random capitalization. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle.”
118. “I can almost imagine a happiness without her, the ability to let her go, to feel our roots are connected even if I never see that leaf of grass again.”
119. “Aren’t you worried about, like forever?”
“Forever is composed of nows,” she says.”
120. “I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I’ve never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow.”
121. “’Basically,’ she said, ‘this is going to be the best night of your life.’”
122. “I had always liked that: I liked routine. I liked being bored. I didn’t want to, but I did.”
123. “A Margo for each of us–and each more mirror than window.”
124. “I can’t be you. You can’t be me. You can imagine another well — but never quite perfectly, you know? ”
125. “Perfection stands still while mortals walk past. – Quentin “Q” Jacobsen”
126. “sometimes the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.”
127. “For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.”
128. “At some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too.”
129. “Oh my God I’m going to kill you!’ But she was laughing.”
130. “Everything is uglier up close,’ she said.”
131. “The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.”
132. “I hope this is the hero’s errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
133. “Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can’t do that until your life has grown roots.”
134. “Dude, I don’t want to talk about Lacey’s prom shoes. And I’ll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It’s called a penis.”
135. “It’s kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way.”
136. “I wanted to stop peeing but couldn’t, of course. Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.”
137. “Still, the mere idea of a plan appealed to me.”
138. “Forever is composed of nows,”
139. “There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined. I feel like this is an important idea, one of those ideas that your brain must wrap itself around slowly.”
140. “She was too small and the space covered by maps too big.”
141. “The pleasure isn’t in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it.”
142. “It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”
143. “She raised one leg and gave me all her weight as I dipped her. She either trusted me or wanted to fall.”
144. “When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can’t really fully and honestly take those back.”
145. “You have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another.”
146. “Maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.”
147. “That sickly sour stench designed to keep the living from the dead.”
148. “We Play the broken string of our instruments one last time.”
149. “I don’t know who she is anymore, or who she was, but I need to find her.”
150. “Doing stuff never feels as good as you hope it will feel.”
151. “It’s more impressive from a distance…You can’t see the wear on things, you know? You can’t see the rust or the weeds or the paint cracking. You see the place as someone once imagined it.”
152. “At least I carpe’d that one diem.”
153. “A paper town for a paper girl.”