John Green, Paper Towns

"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..."

"A poem can't do its work if you only read snippets of it."

"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."

"It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing attainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who's kinda bossy, then I had to basically start liking a whole different person."

"I think the future deserves our faith. But it is hard to argue with Emily Dickinson."

"The gray paint peels off the wall in odd and beautiful patterns, each cracked polygon of paint a snowflake of decay."

"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."

"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 listenin EXPOSES you even more that in exposes the people you're trying to listen to."

"Everything looks uglier close up."

"You shall no longer take things at second or third hand... nor look through the eyes of the dead... nor feed on the spectres in books. I tramp a perpetual journey All goes onward and outward... and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. If no other in the world be aware I sit content, And if each and all be aware I sit content. The final three stanzas of 'Song of Myself" were also highlighted. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to your nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one places search another, I stop some where waiting for you It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she'd left for me. I could never get anywhere with the lines, but I kepr thinking about them anyway, becase I didn't want to disappoint her. She wanted me to play out with the string, to find the place where she had stopped and was waiting for me, to follow the bread crumb trail until it dead-ended into her."

"I will play out the string. I will not betray your trust. I will find you."

"She loved so much misteries tha she became one"

"Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music."

"Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start."

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

"The longer I do my job the more I realize that 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."

"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 misimagined."

"People say friends don't destroy each other What do they know about friends?"

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

"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 onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead."