Collected Quotes from “Paper Towns”
Best Of “Each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these 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 open in places. And I mean, yeah, once…
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Best Of
“Each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these 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 open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. […] But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs.”
— Paper Towns: Agloe – Pages 237-238
“Maybe I am the most horribly self-centered person in the history of the word. But God, do you think I would […] if I didn’t need to?”
— Paper Towns: Agloe – Page 226
“On some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings the same way we are. We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 24 – Page 164
“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 my body for the real fear when it comes.”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 17 – Page 120
Chapter by Chapter
Agloe
“Each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these 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 open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. […] But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs.”
— Paper Towns: Agloe – Pages 237-238
“It’s kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way.”— Paper Towns: Agloe – Page 232
— Paper Towns: Agloe – Page 232
“Maybe I am the most horribly self-centered person in the history of the word. But God, do you think I would […] if I didn’t need to?”
— Paper Towns: Agloe – Page 226
Hour Ten
“Just remember that sometimes the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are. […] People are different when you can smell them and see them up close, you know?”
— Paper Towns: Hour Ten – Page 213
Chapter 29
“Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you.”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 29 – Page 193
Chapter 24
“On some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings the same way we are. We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 24 – Page 164
Chapter 20
“Maybe she deserved to be forgotten. But at any rate, I couldn’t forget her.”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 20 – Page 138
“A poem can’t do its work if you only read snippets of it.”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 20 – Page 136
“Is hope a kind of insanity, or is it the very definition of humanness?”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 20 – Page 134
Chapter 19
“Although I could understand each word of it, I couldn’t understand anything about it as a whole.”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 19 – Page 128
Chapter 17
“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 my body for the real fear when it comes.”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 17 – Page 120
Chapter 8
“I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back. […] And that’s like a promise. […] In sickness and in health. In good times and in bad. For richer, for poorer.”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 8 – Page 62
Chapter 5
“When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can’t really fully and honestly take those back, you know?”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 5 – Page 44
Chapter 4
“It’s a penis in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state: it may have an illustrious history, but it sure isn’t big.”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 4 – Page 40
“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.”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 4 – Page 38
Chapter 3
“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 so they spent more time thinking about it. About the 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.”
— Paper Towns: Chapter 3 – Page 33
Introduction“I liked routine. I liked being bored. I didn’t want to, but I did.”
— Paper Towns: Page 26
Things to Note
All page numbers come from ebook version.
