Paper Towns

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.

“When I’ve thought about him dying—which admittedly isn’t that much—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 still alive. We don

Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside someone else.

“Forever is composed of nows,”

“‘But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.’ ”

Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.

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

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”