Quotes from John Green's Paper Towns

Bookish Mardi: John Green's Paper Towns

"The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle." - John Green 

Indeed! Everyone gets a miracle. For a miracle had just landed unto me way back last year as our second grading examination ended, I bumped into a  petty yet witty chit chat with my sophomore student , Joshua, about books. Yes with books, for I believe we've been on the same boat with this kid when it comes to such. He asked me about books I've read and I did reciprocate. Until we ended up with him letting me borrow some  of his John Green's books. He personally recommended such books and author to me ,most especially "The Fault in Our Stars" ( check out for my next blog about TFiOS), because according to him are wonderfully written. 

As he handed me the books, this and the TFiOS, I right away read it for I was excited, too. I read first the Paper Towns, and believe me I did finish the book for more than a couple of months or so. Want to ask me the magical word "WHY"? hahahahah!!! The story, yes Josh wasn't wrong when he said they are written well, yet I just find the book "too teenager" for me. It was dragging me all the way. My problem is if I cannot finish this book, I will REALLY never start reading the other. So, though, it took me too long I luckily finished the book. ^^

So as not to bore you with so much blah blah and blah's, here it goes:

Photo  from @ceebrensan
one hungry afternoon with John G. ^^

Book Summary

Paper Towns is the story of a boy named Quentin Jacobsen and the adventure he is drawn into by his childhood friend and secret love Margo Roth Spiegelman. As children, Quentin and Margo discovered a dead man's body; an event that binds them in ways they do not realize. As they grow up however, they grow apart. After this is explained in the prologue, Part I of the book sets up the main narrative by introducing the setting, Jefferson High in Orlando, Florida in the early 2000s and introduces Quentin's good friends, Radar and Ben Starling, his fellow nerds. In contrast, Margo is the most popular girl in school who has an incredible reputation for her wild hijinks. The plot takes off in Chapter 3 when Margo sneaks into Quentin's bedroom and asks him to help her execute an eleven-part plan, which largely involves taking revenge on her ex-boyfriend. Throughout the night, Quentin is exhilarated and his love for Margo is reenergized.

In Part II of the book, Margo completely disappears and Quentin wonders if he will see her again. However, Margo has left him a series of clues as to her whereabouts. Part II is spent piecing together Margo's clues. Quentin pursues Margo with the help of his friends, but all the while, high school comes to an end. Quentin follows a string of false leads, which makes him increasingly reflective and leads him to gradually accept that he has made Margo into a magical non-person, a "paper girl" and that he loves someone who may not exist. He eventually decides that the only way to ind Margo is to understand who she is. Throughout Part II, Quentin grapples with Margo's use of the phrase "paper towns" in her clues. Eventually he figures out that a paper town is a false city on a map that cartographers once used to detect copycats. Margo had left for the paper town of Algoe, New York.

Part III begins the night of graduation when Quentin grabs his friends to leave on an intense, twenty-one hour road trip from Orlando to upstate Agloe. Quentin, Radar, Ben, and Ben's new girlfriend Lacey, must catch Margo the day before she leaves Agloe forever. When they reach Agloe, they find Margo in an old barn, writing. After fighting furiously about Margo's apparent selfishness for leaving, Ben, Radar, and Lacey storm out. Quentin and Margo learn that they had idealized one another and love each other. However, they both realize with regret that their love was based in falsehood, in being a "paper boy" and a "paper girl." Margo left in order to release everyone from the effects of her false, public personality. Quentin, however, does not give up on Margo. They admit their romantic affections for one another but realize that their values must inevitably lead them to separate futures.

Photo from Web 

“Aren't rhetorical accusations of passive inherently passive aggressive”?  - Margo’s Dad

“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 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. 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.” .” – Margo

“Light, the visible reminder of Invisible Light.”  - T.S. Eliot

“That’s always seemed ridiculous . . . people want to be with someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.” – Margo

“When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true one, because  you can’t really  fully and honestly take those back.” –Margo

“Everything is uglier close up.” –Margo

“Everyone demented on the mania of owning things.”

 

Photo from web

“The town was paper, but the memories were not.”

“The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.”  - Margo

“. . . the pleasure for me wasn’t planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and come back together.” –Margo

“. . . once the string gets cut, you cannot uncut it.” –Detective Warren

“. . . I never found boredom very boring.” –Quentin

“. . . the easiest way to solve a mystery is to decide that there is no mystery to be solved.” –Quentin

“. . . I learn 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 not hearing a shot gun pumped outside. . . This cannot be addressed by breathing exercise. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that trade fish to crawl out onto the dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to ruin, the fear that makes us bury one dead.” –Quentin

“I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself to train myself, to train my body for the real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.” – Quentin

“. . . at some point you gotta stop looking at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too.” –Detective Warren

“. . .every minute wasted in school was another minute in which I failed to find her.” – Quentin

“. . . each of us sharing the same root system like leaves of grass.”  -Dr. Holden

“. . .life is sacred and valuable.” – Dr. Holden

“. . . a poem can’t do its work if you only read snippets of it.” – Dr. Holden

“Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.” – Quentin

“Peeing is like a good book in that is very, very hard to stop once you start.” – Quentin

“. . . humans lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.” – Quentin’s Father

“. . . you listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more that it exposes the people you’re trying to listen to.”

“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. . .

I myself become the wounded person.” – Walt Whitman

“. . . the bad days become so difficult to recall.” – Quentin

“It is so hard to leave – until you leave.” – Quentin

“. . . the bad days become so difficult to recall.” – Quentin

“The longer you wait, the better you feel.”  - Ben

“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 unimaginable.” – Quentin

“We can hear other, and we can travel to them without moving, and we can imagine them, and we are all connected one to the other.” – Quentin

Photo from Web

“Just – just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.” – Ben

“People are different when you can smell them, and see them up close, you know?” –Ben

“It’s easy to like someone from a distant.” – Quentin

“They say that life flashes before your eyes.” –Quentin

“I cannot almost imagine happiness without her, the ability to let her go, to feel our roots are connected and never see that leaf of grass again.” –Quentin

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

“Because it is great hearing the idea that everybody likes you.” – Quentin

“Forever is composed of nows. Emily Dickenson.” – Margo

“I think our future deserves our faith.” – Quentin

“I must ask the wounded man where he is hurt, because I cannot become the wounded man. The only wounded man I can be is me.’ –Quentin

“Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will.” – Margo

“But then again if you don’t imagine, nothing will ever happen at all.” – Quentin

“Imagining is perfect.” – Quentin

“But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining the 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.” – Quentin

Photo from Web

“When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours.” – Quentin 

**Enjoy and have fun!** ^_^