John Green, Paper Towns

"I always like routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring."

"The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence."

"It's like she thinks my job is to please her, and that should be my dearest wish, and when I don't please her - I get shut out."

"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't 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."

"I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies - Q"

"You had been a paper boy to me all these years - two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real."

"Because it's kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place where a paper creation became real. A dot on the map became a real place, more real than the people who created the dot could never have imagined. I thought maybe the paper cutout of a girl could start becoming real here also. And it seemed like a way to tell that paper girl who cared about popularity and clothes and everything else: 'You are going to the paper towns. And you are never coming back."

"Big, ugly homes for big, ugly people,' I told Margo as we pulled into Casavilla.'No shit. If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms, do me a favor and shoot me."

"That doesn't sound like my Margo", she said, and I thought of my Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different funhouse mirrors."

"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."

"I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe 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 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. Do you know what I mean?"

"I felt the worry start to snatch at my breath when I finished talking."

"My heart is really pounding," I said. "That's how you know you're having fun."

"The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never get 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’m not up for laughing, but their laughter makes the room feel safer, so we begin to explore."

"I didn't really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia."

"The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all."

"I mean, he was something that happened to me, you know? But before he was this minor figure in the drama of my life he was - you know, the central figure in the drama of his own life."

"I would not be dying if it were not for her. I would have stayed home, as I have always stayed home, and I would have been safe, and I would have done the one thing I have always wanted to do, which is to grow up."

"To die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier."