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:

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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.

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“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.”

 

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“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

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“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

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“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!** ^_^

Love Musing No. 3 - "?"

A Rhetorical Question for Thy Month of Love

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“Her heart was a secret garden and the walls were very high.” 

― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

For all the years you've lived, have you asked yourself how thick your heart is? To what extent can it hold love? Has it been capable of feeling the "real" love?  As the love of month (of which I have been writing LOVE blah blah blah's because of such reason) continues to swift off time, probably, it's also about time to assess your own self and ask how thick your heart is.

Most of the time we spend life nailing pieces of armor onto it each and every day. Armor so no one can get inside. You are only given one heart so once it is gone, so are you. There is no recovery from a broken heart. There is no way to mend it once it’s been wounded. So who invented love and why? Love is just a way of giving your heart up to perish, returning the bullet to your shooter so he/she can try again. 

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Love is the result of failed armor. You spend all this time protecting your heart and emotions, protecting them from some cruel persons who will try to break down your barriers. You try to protect yourself from nothing, but heartbreak. That is all that love leads up to, heartbreak. The glorious image of a fairytale ending and the princess and prince is just what it is called, a fairytale. None of those things exist. Those are torture devices our media has come up with. They are images they tease us with even though we know it will never happen. These images are the bait. They look good, but end up in disaster. 

As you go through life there will be someone cruel enough to squeeze their way into your heart. They will try to break down the barriers you have spent your whole life building. Whoever that person may be, they will get in if you let them. Your protection will not be strong enough. You will let that deceiving person in to pull, and tug, and rip at your heart. They will trick you into letting them in, and you will let them in. 

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You most likely will not believe what is being said right now. Most people don’t, because of the fairytale image that the media has created. You can say that you will be strong. You will not be gullible. You will stick your ground. But when it comes down to it, no one really does. Everyone falls into the pit of love-- the torture chamber. Love is no different than that fake contest on your computer that ends up spamming you.

The lyrics in the love songs of today, yesterday, and tomorrow have been written by people with no experience. The lyrics to the songs of heart break are written by people who have been fooled. The sad thing about love is that you never truly understand it, until you have felt the pain. Love is not a subject in school or a hobby you can study. It is not a test you can ace, because eventually everyone fails. As no one has the same finger print, no one has the same story. They may be similar, but they are never exactly the same. The only thing that is the same in every love story is that eventually you get fooled by a cruel person, and it all ends in failure. That’s how all love stories end.

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So when that time comes, when some villain pries open the armor that guards your heart, toys with your emotions, and then throws it aside, don’t feel alone. That is how everyone’s love story ends: heartbreak, deception, lies, betrayal, and sorrow. No one knows why love ends this way, or why it is such a gigantic contradiction, but it is. The worst thing of all is that you are aware of how painful it will be. You are aware that it will end in heartbreak. You are aware that nothing but regret will come from it, but we get sabotaged by it anyways. 

The villain who enters your heart will block your clear vision and convince you that love is wonderful. Then, once you are brought back to reality again, it is as if you were not in this world. It is as if you were stuck in a concussion and just regained your consciousness. You do not realize how foolish you are being when you are in love. Then, later on, you look back on the memories and ask yourself, “How did I fall for that?”

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Soul mates. Lovers. “Meant to be.” They are all a façade. Why is it that we use the adjective lovely to mean beauty, when it is a derivative of the word love? Love -- the worst creation. Your heart is not an experiment. There are no re-dos. You only have one, and when you damage it there is almost no way to recover. Love starts out great and ends up as one big regret. Heart break, deception, lies, questions, low self-esteem, blindness, pessimism, hopelessness, despair, misery, anguish, depression, sorrow, betrayal, foolishness, wonder, disillusion, backstabbing, lack of comfort, fear, and tears are all the sorrowful results of love. Love is not a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. 

How thick is your heart? ^^

Love After 81 Months of Togetherness

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“One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.” 

― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

The word love scares people. It gives us a sense of power, a sense of belonging. When someone tells you that they love you it could be the best feeling in the world, or the worst. Some people just say it, because they don’t know what else is left. However, there are others who are completely sure. I know that some don’t believe it exists, or that there’s no true meaning to the word love. With TRUE love however, there are exceptions. With this blog, I'd like to share how I viewed that four-letter-word after 81 months of being in love with My Man all over again. ^^

There are reasons behind saying “I love you” to someone, and if someone really means it, they might be at a loss for words or have too many to write. I'm fond of saying  those words to not just anyone but those whom I surely love, my family, friends, classmates, and above all my HIM. Why? Because I know who I am, and I know where I stand. I’m not afraid to take chances, to take risks. Where would I be without them? So don’t be so confused or scared, just take a breath out of life. Take a step back and just relax, and think about things not with your head, but with your heart. Let me show you what I mean… to me:

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 is when you hear that person’s name, and everything freezes. Love is when you’re out at a party having fun with your friends, and you find yourself in a zone thinking of that one person. It’s when you get sudden urges to just want to talk to them for no reason, when you can see anything and make it somehow remind you of them.

. . . LOVE is when you think about that same person every night before bed, and keep them in your prayers. It’s when you wake up in the morning, hoping that you have a missed call or a text from them. Love is when you don’t have that person in your life, and you dream about them. Your dreams are so real and feel so good, because you’re actually seeing or feeling that one person; and you would just rather sleep all day because reality just isn't that great without them in your life. 

It’s when you could set aside one whole day, and from beginning to end have a million things to say about them. Love is when even after not seeing that person for a long time, yet you still smile whenever they cross your mind. Love is being able to read that person inside and out, and knowing that even when they say that everything is okay, everything is really not.

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Love is about fighting through the struggles, and wanting to get through them; even though it may mean tears and hurt feelings. It’s about not caring what others think, or have said or want for you. Love is when you close your eyes and you see their faces, it’s when you can’t help but smile when you see them walking towards you. Love is about wanting only that one person, because for some crazy reason no one else just seems good enough. It’s about finding a flaw in everyone else you try to love, it’s about comparing who you really love to those you do not, and it’s not about just the surface, it’s so much more. 

It’s knowing they’ll always be there for you, no matter how many hurtful things they’ve said in the past. It’s about holding their hand and feeling safe. Love is when without that person you feel lost and confused, even though you tell yourself you’re not. Love isn’t about keeping track of time, but losing track of time; and knowing that it doesn’t matter how long you have or haven’t been together, but just knowing. It’s about forgiving and forgetting. It’s about pushing forward, yet never wanting a good moment to end. 

Love is when you have things that remind you of that person, and they suddenly become your most precious gifts. Love is when you hear others saying hurtful things about that person, and you feel just as hurt as they would, if they had heard it themselves. Love is about realizing you’re not the same unless they’re there, and it’s about bettering yourself with them around. It’s so much more than just having fun with that person, or finding things in common. It’s about a deeper connection, and even if you don’t know every little thing about that person, you still know them better than they know themselves. It’s when you feel like everyday spent without them is a lost cause. 

Love is when you hug your pillow at night, and fall asleep thinking it’s that one person when you don’t have them with you. Love is when you can easily lay in bed with them all day. Love is about forgetting the world around you when you’re together, and when you hold each other you don’t have a care in the world.

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Love is about knowing, knowing that without that person there is something missing. It’s about digging deep inside and asking yourself if you can truly be happy without them around. Love is about looking to your future, and seeing that person next to you, and it’s about knowing that if they’re not there then you’re just not going to be happy; even if you pretend. Love is being at a loss for words, yet being able to write a million about what love really is.

Love is out there, and it’s real. Everyone has their own stories, and so everyone will have their own definition. Love is confusing and it’s not something to take for granted nor to be pushed aside. It’s something to cherish, and to hold on to as long as you can. No one can predict the future, and no one can say they will love someone forever. But you can promise someone that all of these things are true. Love isn't something to be played with, it can heal but it can kill just as easily. It’s not a game yet it can’t be taken too seriously. Love is whatever you make it, but before you say it you better make sure you know it’s for sure, because those three words “I love you” are the most dangerous words in the world.

Though I've been describing love as so many blah blah blah. . .nothing still beats this biblical definition as to what love is. . . ^^

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Re-Welcoming My Love Musings

Time has been so swift that I barely noticed it's been a year and a month or so since I started blogging. Anyhow, just some sort of reminiscing, it's the month of February which had led  me to an overwhelming number of page viewers for my  Happiness After Failed Relationship blog, of which by now had reached 3000 views. With this in mind, the idea of writing again some LOVE MUSINGS popped up in my mind. And since most of my blogs are about novels I've read, then for a lil change, why not!?

To start with, before you are to continue scrolling down, I want to provoke your thoughts for a little. It's just simple. Please be able to make a sentence out from the image below.

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Thank you for your minute cooperation. It's because I once taught that love is a treasure to be cherished. Which is why I did some digging way back in my childhood in our backyard to search for such. hahahaha! Silly, isn't it? Later did I realize that it's never a thing to be unearthed in somebody's backyard and unfortunately not even in OUR backyard. 

Here's the real thing. Love. It’s a simple but overused word. I love you. I love this song! I absolutely loved that movie! The word doesn't mean much anymore, not to most. Some people scoff at it. We throw it around like a used shirt from wearing it because it becomes tattered, uncomforatable, and sometimes we just come to love some new ones. But we never truly understand why we have it. We lend it out, forget about it, and years later, we think, “Hey, I really liked that shirt.”

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But do we care? No. It’s probably gone now, thrown away because of a rip or sold for a hundred peso at a garage sale. We forget and it doesn't matter after that.

Then we see the world fall apart. 

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From the safety of our living rooms we watch amateur video on the news or Internet, and sometimes we feel so helpless and alone we’re not sure what to do. We cry for the inhumanity, scream for the injustice, and wonder why the world is this way. We think we can change the world; 

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. . . we know we want to help those who need it most. . .  then we remember that T-shirt we threw out years ago. 

We want it back; we fight and scramble for it. We go out and buy new shirts, try them on, but none seems to fit. We've lost it – we've lost LOVE. We are unnerved for a bit; we sit alone and beat ourselves up for letting it go. Then we just shrug it off. We say, “I’ll do it later” or “I’m too busy.”  "I’m guilty of it too." “I don’t have the right resources” or “I’m too young” or better yet “No one will care.” And it seems as if no one does. 

Here then I've questioned myself, "Is my generation going to save the world?" We try, a small group of us, but our shirts are faded among the bright colors of greed, lust, and many others. We are pushed into the background. We try to push our way through the crowds, and we truly wonder, "Where has the love gone?"

I don’t want my love to fade; though my shirt is tattered and worn, I wear it daily. I am honest and open, and when I say that simple, dead, four-letter word, I mean it. I know I've made mistakes with it in the past and I almost threw my shirt away, but the most important thing is I carry it carefully now. It’s close to my heart, where it’s meant to be. I do lend it out every once in a while – I let those who need it try it on and feel the safety that I feel. I leave them pieces when I go, but my shirt never seems to tear. It stays just as simple as it ever was.

When the time comes, I will stand alone in this world and stare into the eyes of those with the shirts of greed and want and lust, and I will know that even though mine is not the most beautiful shirt in the crowd, it’s among the best I will ever have. And believe me, never will I ever trade it in for any other shirts.

After all, I've come to think that yes LOVE is a treasure for others, while I have mine in a form of a Tee. What about yours? ^^