Turtles All The Way Down

These are my top 50 quotes from (John Green’s) newest book, Turtles All The Way Down. Enjoy. 

1. “But i was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.”

2. “You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas.”

3. “I was somebody’s something”

4. “Admittedly, I have some anxiety problems, but I would argue it isn’t irrational to be concerned about the fact that you are a skin-encased bacterial colony.”

5. “’Break Hearts, Not Promises.’”

6. “It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”

7. “I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.”

8. “But the things that make other people nervous have never scared me...I didn’t know precisely what I was afraid of, but it wasn’t this.”

9. “’Well you’re not your name’”

10. “I never understood my body- was it scared or excited?”

11. “...like invasive weeds, these thoughts seem to arrive at my biosphere from some faraway land, and then they spread out of control.”

12. “...you tell yourself, I am not my thoughts, even though deep down you’re not sure exactly what that makes you.” 

13. “But the sky isn’t one thing. The sky is everything.”

14. “You cant choose. That’s the problem.”

15. “’Life is not something you wield, you know?’”

16. “’...There’s no need to suffer.’ Which I’d argue is a fundamental misunderstanding of the human predicament...”

17. “’What’s the difference between who you are and what you have? Maybe nothing.”

18. “...Everybody disappears eventually.”

19. “’I feel like I might not be driving the bus of my own consciousness.’”

20. “’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 body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.’”

21. “ I think, You will never be free from this. I think, You don’t pick your thoughts.”

22. “’People can be careless too.’”

23. “...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.”

24. “They laughed because something was funny; I laughed because they had.”

25. “’ And if you can’t pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren’t really real, you know?’”

26. “My favorite pictures of my dad are the few where he’s out of focus-because that’s how people are, really...”

27. “Hated myself. Hated this”

28. “...but my consciousness felt like a camera with a dirty lens...”

29.”’...The sentence doesn’t have, like, an object. I’m just scared.’”

30. “’...But you’re slightly tortured, and the way you’re tortured is sometimes painful for, like, everyone around you.’”

31. “’The parasite believes itself to be the host.’”

32. “’...you realize that you’re not actually in a prison cell. You are the prison cell.’”

33. “’But it’s not forever...it’s now...’”

34. “...but I could not cinch the lasso on my thoughts, which were galloping all around my brain.”

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

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

37. “Every loss is unprecedented. 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”

38. “’Ayala wasn’t a bad person, just a useless one.”

39. “...Clueless, helpless, useless. Less.”

40. “Maybe you’re already gone”

41. “I wasn’t possessed by a demon. I was the demon.”

42. “’I fell like a noose is tightening around me and I want out, but struggling only cinches the knot. The spiral just keeps tightening...’”

43. “’Actually the problem is that I can’t lose my mind...It’s inescapable.’”

44. ”’...And when I look for, like, Real Me, I never find it...’”

45. “I was a story riddled with plot holes.”

46. “’Honestly, I feel really fragile I feel like I’ve been taped back together.”

47. “You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.”

48. “But the world is also stories we tell about it.”

49. “It’s not how you die. It’s who you die.”

50. ”To be alive is to be missing.”