24 'Paper Towns' Quotes To Remind You That Love Is An Illusion But Friendship Is The Real Deal

“Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will… but then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“Did you know that 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 plann…”

— John Green, amazon.com

“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“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. The light rushes out and floods in.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“How can you separate those things though? The people are the place is the people.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“Everything's uglier close up.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“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?”

— John Green, amazon.com

“Forever is comprised of nows.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“Even with everything broken and decided inside her she couldn't quite allow herself to disappear for good.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“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.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, a…”

— John Green, amazon.com

“She loved mysteries so much that she became one.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“Maybe its like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen - these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack in place…”

— John Green, amazon.com

“You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“You have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“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.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.”

— John Green, amazon.com

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”

— John Green, amazon.com