BEST QUOTES FROM TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN BY JOHN GREEN
I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.
You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas.
I thought about how we all believed ourselves to be the hero of some personal epic, when in fact we were basically identical organisms colonizing a vast and windowless room.
Was thinking that if half the cells inside
of you are not you, doesn’t that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular
pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate?
We were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe more intimate than eye contact anyway.
Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.
Maybe you’ve been in love. I mean real love, the kind my grandmother used to
describe by quoting the apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the love
that is kind and patient, that does not envy or boast, that beareth all things and
believeth all things and endureth all things. I don’t like to throw the L-word
around; it’s too good and rare a feeling to cheapen with overuse. You can live a
good life without ever knowing real love, of the Corinthians variety, but I was
fortunate to have found it with Harold.
(Btw Harold was her car )
True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.
I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.
But the things that make other people nervous have never scared me. I didn’t know precisely what I was afraid of, but it wasn’t this.
I didn’t know if I should hug him, and he didn’t seem to know if he should hug me, so we just sort of stood there not touching, which to be honest is my preferred form of greeting.
Aza, this is Malik Moore, our zoologist.” He said “our zoologist” as if they were normal words to say in the course of everyday conversation, as if most people who reached a certain standing in life acquired a zoologist.
Whether it hurts is kind of irrelevant.
“I’m really not looking to date anyone.” I know people often say that when
secretly looking for a romantic partner, but I meant it. I definitely felt attracted to
some people, and I liked the idea of being with someone, but the actual
mechanics of it didn’t much suit my talents. Like, parts of typical romantic
relationships that made me anxious included 1. Kissing; 2. Having to say the
right things to avoid hurt feelings; 3. Saying more wrong things while trying to
apologize; 4. Being at a movie theater together and feeling obligated to hold
hands even after your hands become sweaty and the sweat starts mixing
together; and 5. The part where they say, “What are you thinking about?” And
they want you to be, like, “I’m thinking about you, darling,” but you’re actually
thinking about how cows literally could not survive if it weren’t for the bacteria
in their guts, and how that sort of means that cows do not exist as independent
life-forms, but that’s not really something you can say out loud, so you’re
ultimately forced to choose between lying and seeming weird.
Nothing says fuck you to your kids quite like leaving your fortune to a lizard.
“Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.”
There’s no need to suffer. Which I’d argue is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the human predicament, but okay.
Break hearts, not promises, Holmesy.
And the thing is, when you lose someone, you realize you’ll eventually lose everyone.
And once you know that, you can never forget it.
Davis was right: Everybody disappears eventually
That was supposed the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.
And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot
know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with
catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and
minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant,
ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the
terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage
people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental
health around a word other than crazy.
True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.
I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.
But the things that make other people nervous have never scared me. I didn’t know precisely what I was afraid of, but it wasn’t this.
I didn’t know if I should hug him, and he didn’t seem to know if he should hug me, so we just sort of stood there not touching, which to be honest is my preferred form of greeting.
Aza, this is Malik Moore, our zoologist.” He said “our zoologist” as if they were normal words to say in the course of everyday conversation, as if most people who reached a certain standing in life acquired a zoologist.
Whether it hurts is kind of irrelevant.
“I’m really not looking to date anyone.” I know people often say that when
secretly looking for a romantic partner, but I meant it. I definitely felt attracted to
some people, and I liked the idea of being with someone, but the actual
mechanics of it didn’t much suit my talents. Like, parts of typical romantic
relationships that made me anxious included 1. Kissing; 2. Having to say the
right things to avoid hurt feelings; 3. Saying more wrong things while trying to
apologize; 4. Being at a movie theater together and feeling obligated to hold
hands even after your hands become sweaty and the sweat starts mixing
together; and 5. The part where they say, “What are you thinking about?” And
they want you to be, like, “I’m thinking about you, darling,” but you’re actually
thinking about how cows literally could not survive if it weren’t for the bacteria
in their guts, and how that sort of means that cows do not exist as independent
life-forms, but that’s not really something you can say out loud, so you’re
ultimately forced to choose between lying and seeming weird.
Nothing says fuck you to your kids quite like leaving your fortune to a lizard.
“Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.”
There’s no need to suffer. Which I’d argue is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the human predicament, but okay.
Break hearts, not promises, Holmesy.
And the thing is, when you lose someone, you realize you’ll eventually lose everyone.
And once you know that, you can never forget it.
Davis was right: Everybody disappears eventually
That was supposed the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.
And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot
know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with
catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and
minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant,
ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the
terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage
people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental
health around a word other than crazy.
She told me she wanted to see me in ten days. You can kind of measure how
crazy you are based on how soon they want to see you back.
For hours or days, the thoughts would leave me be, and I could remember something my mom told me
once: Your now is not your forever.
I went to class, got good grades, wrote papers, talked to Mom after lunch, ate dinner, watched television, read. I was not always stuck inside myself, or inside my selves. I wasn’t only crazy.
We are both eating dinner at the same restaurant at the same time. It’s not marriage.
Dr. Singh told me once that if you have a perfectly tuned guitar and a
perfectly tuned violin in the same room, and you pluck the D string of the guitar,
then all the way across the room, the D string on the violin will also vibrate. I
could always feel my mother’s vibrating strings.
And even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere
else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.
And then they went back to talking, the conversation shifting this way and that, everyone telling stories, talking over one another, laughing. I tried to smile and shake my head at the right times, but I was always a moment behind the rest of them. They laughed because something was funny; I laughed because they had.
Everyone always celebrates the easy attractiveness of green or blue eyes, but there was a depth to Davis’s brown eyes that you just don’t get from lighter colors, and the way he looked at me made me feel like there was something worthwhile in the brown of my eyes, too.
But I couldn’t stop myself, because I wanted him to understand that I felt like the fish, like my whole story was written by someone else.
She was as much a person as any other person; you’re real, but not because of your body or because of your thoughts.
“Nobody ever says anything is too bad to be true.”
As I put down my phone, I noticed Mom standing in my doorway.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Holy Helicopter Parenting, Mom.”
I felt like I could remember—him pushing me on the swing, his hand as big as my back, the certainty that swinging away from him also meant swinging back to him
My favorite pictures of my dad are the few where he’s out of focus—because that’s how people are, really.
“The question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.”
He really disappeared a long time ago, which is maybe why it didn’t bother me much. I wish he were here, but I’ve wished that for a long time.
I guess at some point, you realize that whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can’t actually protect you from getting hurt. Which is one thing. But Noah is starting to understand that maybe the person he thought was a superhero turns out sort of to be the villain. And that really sucks.
It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.
I wanted to tell him that the idea of being in a feeling gave language to
something I couldn’t describe before, created a form for it, but
I couldn’t figure out how to say any of that out loud.
It was so much easier to talk to him in the dark, looking at the same sky instead of at each other. It felt like we didn’t have bodies, like we were just voices talking
Reading someone’s poetry is like seeing them naked.
I couldn’t make myself happy, but I could make people around me miserable.
Even though I was supposed to be basically grown up and my mother annoyed the hell out of me, I couldn’t stop thinking until her lullaby finally put me to sleep.
When you’re on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that.
Nobody who’s doing it ever talks about anything else.
A change in personal circumstances, even a positive one, can trigger anxiety. So it wouldn’t be uncommon to feel anxious as you develop a new relationship.
There is something intensely weird and upsetting about the notion that
you can only become yourself by ingesting a medication that
changes your self.
Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.
You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.
What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.
Our screens were lighting each of us with light from the other’s bedroom. I could only see him because he could see me. In the fear and excitement of being in front of each other in that grainy silver light, it felt like I wasn’t really in my bed and he wasn’t really in his. Instead, we were together in the non sensorial place, almost like we were inside the other’s consciousness, a closeness that real life with its real bodies could never match.
I now saw myself as Daisy saw me— clueless, helpless, useless. Less.
You never think much about weather when it’s good, but once it gets cold enough to see your breath, you can’t ignore it.
The weather decides when you think about it, not the other way around.
It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it.
Photographs are just light and time
In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt
Mychal said once that you’re like mustard. Great in small quantities, but then a lot of you is . . . a lot.
It hurt to cry, but I hadn’t cried in so long, and I didn’t really want to stop
The most important part of the body ‘ain’t the heart or the lungs or the brain. The biggest, most important part of the body is the part that hurts.
I knew now for sure. I wasn’t possessed by a demon. I was the demon
You don’t have to be afraid of that thought. Thought is not action.
“Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.”
You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.
IT’S NOT HOW YOU DIE. IT’S WHO YOU DIE.
I don’t understand how you can be so inhumanly calm down here, fifteen feet below downtown Indianapolis, ankle deep in rat shit, but you have a panic attack when you think your finger is infected.
We are both eating dinner at the same restaurant at the same time. It’s not marriage.
Dr. Singh told me once that if you have a perfectly tuned guitar and a
perfectly tuned violin in the same room, and you pluck the D string of the guitar,
then all the way across the room, the D string on the violin will also vibrate. I
could always feel my mother’s vibrating strings.
And even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere
else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.
And then they went back to talking, the conversation shifting this way and that, everyone telling stories, talking over one another, laughing. I tried to smile and shake my head at the right times, but I was always a moment behind the rest of them. They laughed because something was funny; I laughed because they had.
Everyone always celebrates the easy attractiveness of green or blue eyes, but there was a depth to Davis’s brown eyes that you just don’t get from lighter colors, and the way he looked at me made me feel like there was something worthwhile in the brown of my eyes, too.
But I couldn’t stop myself, because I wanted him to understand that I felt like the fish, like my whole story was written by someone else.
She was as much a person as any other person; you’re real, but not because of your body or because of your thoughts.
“Nobody ever says anything is too bad to be true.”
As I put down my phone, I noticed Mom standing in my doorway.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Holy Helicopter Parenting, Mom.”
I felt like I could remember—him pushing me on the swing, his hand as big as my back, the certainty that swinging away from him also meant swinging back to him
My favorite pictures of my dad are the few where he’s out of focus—because that’s how people are, really.
“The question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.”
He really disappeared a long time ago, which is maybe why it didn’t bother me much. I wish he were here, but I’ve wished that for a long time.
I guess at some point, you realize that whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can’t actually protect you from getting hurt. Which is one thing. But Noah is starting to understand that maybe the person he thought was a superhero turns out sort of to be the villain. And that really sucks.
It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.
I wanted to tell him that the idea of being in a feeling gave language to
something I couldn’t describe before, created a form for it, but
I couldn’t figure out how to say any of that out loud.
It was so much easier to talk to him in the dark, looking at the same sky instead of at each other. It felt like we didn’t have bodies, like we were just voices talking
Reading someone’s poetry is like seeing them naked.
I couldn’t make myself happy, but I could make people around me miserable.
Even though I was supposed to be basically grown up and my mother annoyed the hell out of me, I couldn’t stop thinking until her lullaby finally put me to sleep.
When you’re on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that.
A change in personal circumstances, even a positive one, can trigger anxiety. So it wouldn’t be uncommon to feel anxious as you develop a new relationship.
There is something intensely weird and upsetting about the notion that
you can only become yourself by ingesting a medication that
changes your self.
Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.
You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.
What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.
Our screens were lighting each of us with light from the other’s bedroom. I could only see him because he could see me. In the fear and excitement of being in front of each other in that grainy silver light, it felt like I wasn’t really in my bed and he wasn’t really in his. Instead, we were together in the non sensorial place, almost like we were inside the other’s consciousness, a closeness that real life with its real bodies could never match.
I now saw myself as Daisy saw me— clueless, helpless, useless. Less.
You never think much about weather when it’s good, but once it gets cold enough to see your breath, you can’t ignore it.
The weather decides when you think about it, not the other way around.
It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it.
Photographs are just light and time
In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt
Mychal said once that you’re like mustard. Great in small quantities, but then a lot of you is . . . a lot.
It hurt to cry, but I hadn’t cried in so long, and I didn’t really want to stop
The most important part of the body ‘ain’t the heart or the lungs or the brain. The biggest, most important part of the body is the part that hurts.
I knew now for sure. I wasn’t possessed by a demon. I was the demon
You don’t have to be afraid of that thought. Thought is not action.
“Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.”
You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.
IT’S NOT HOW YOU DIE. IT’S WHO YOU DIE.
I don’t understand how you can be so inhumanly calm down here, fifteen feet below downtown Indianapolis, ankle deep in rat shit, but you have a panic attack when you think your finger is infected.
The truth always disappoints.
Sometimes you think you’re spending money, but all along the money’s spending you
He was still dying, really—which meant I guess that he was still living, too.
I remember what I’ve imagined and imagine what I remember.
I wasn’t sure whether life would be better frozen in this moment, or on the other side of the moment that was coming.
I wished I could tell him that he had me, that he could count on me, but he couldn’t.
The problem with happy endings is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know.
Sometimes you think you’re spending money, but all along the money’s spending you
He was still dying, really—which meant I guess that he was still living, too.
I remember what I’ve imagined and imagine what I remember.
I wasn’t sure whether life would be better frozen in this moment, or on the other side of the moment that was coming.
I wished I could tell him that he had me, that he could count on me, but he couldn’t.
The problem with happy endings is that they’re either not really happy, or not really endings, you know.
In real life, some things get better and some things get worse.
And then eventually you die.
And then eventually you die.
'And Then Eventually You Die’ Holmes is here to remind you of how the story really ends, with the extinction of our species.
You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don’t choose what’s in the picture, but you decide on the frame.
I still missed him, though. I missed my dad, too. And Harold. I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.
There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.
You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don’t choose what’s in the picture, but you decide on the frame.
I still missed him, though. I missed my dad, too. And Harold. I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.
There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.
I will try and write a review for this (I may not). I'm so freaking busy I can't even write a small review. But in short, I loved this book. I love this book so much. Both the main characters were so relatable for me. I cried reading it. If you get a chance to read this book. Please do. It's awesome. I love Davis. I love Holmsy.
Thank you for reading this. Congrats you made it to the end of this article. I just realised this is too long for anyone to read but still you made it till here. So thank you ^_^
Thats all for now. Ciao ;)
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