Quotes from book
Paper Towns

Paper Towns

John Green

Paper Towns is a novel written by John Green, primarily for an audience of young adults, and was published on October 16, 2008, by Dutton Books. The novel is about the coming-of-age of the protagonist, Quentin "Q" Jacobsen and his search for Margo Roth Spiegelman, his neighbor and childhood sweetheart. During his search, Quentin and his friends Ben, Radar, and Lacey discover information about Margo.John Green drew inspiration for this book from his experience and knowledge of "paper towns" during a road journey through South Dakota. It debuted at number five on the New York Times bestseller list for children's books and was awarded the 2009 Edgar Award for best young adult novel. A film adaptation was released on July 24, 2015.

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

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 282
Paper Towns (2008)

“Lacey takes the bar from me and reluctantly bites into it. She has to close her eyes to hide the orgasmic pleasure inherent in GoFast-tasting. "Oh. My. God. That tastes like hope feels."”

John Green book Paper Towns

Lacey Pemberton, pp. 255-256
Paper Towns (2008)

“The thing about That Guy Is a Gigolo," Radar says, "I mean, the thing about it as a game, is that in the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Marcus "Radar" Lincoln, p. 258
Paper Towns (2008)

“"Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is actually used to cut diamonds," I added.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 16
Paper Towns (2008)

“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 book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 257
Paper Towns (2008)

“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, 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, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. 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.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 3
Paper Towns (2008)

“It's a penis," Margo said, "in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state: it may have an illustrious history, but it sure isn't big.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Margo Roth Spiegelman, p. 41
Paper Towns (2008)

“That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Margo Roth Spiegelman, p. 37
Paper Towns (2008)

“The fundamental mistake I had always made—and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make—was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 199
Paper Towns (2008)

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

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 229
Paper Towns (2008)

“Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. 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 book Paper Towns

Margo Roth Spiegelman, pp. 57-58
Paper Towns (2008)

“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 book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 304
Paper Towns (2008)

“[M]aybe 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.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 301
Paper Towns (2008)

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

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 216
Paper Towns (2008)

“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. I hope this is the hero's errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I've ever done.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 304
Paper Towns (2008)

“Standing before this building, 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 basest 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 out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, pp. 140-141
Paper Towns (2008)

“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.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 8
Paper Towns (2008)

“Maybe all the strings inside him broke.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Margo Roth Spiegelman, p. 4
Paper Towns (2008)

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