Paper Towns - John Green

"The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be 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 could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman."

"Every moment of your life is lived for the future"

"She had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with your own."

"If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms, do me a favor and shoot me."

"It was a psychology trick called empathic listening. You say what the person is feeling so they feel understood. "

"She kind of hates Orlando; she called it paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy."

"She wanted me to play out the string, to find the place where she had stopped and was waiting for me, to follow the bread crumb trail until it deadended into her."

"There are a lot of lakes down there, and wherever there are lakes in Florida there are rich people to congregate around them, so it seemed an unlikely place for a pseudovision."

"You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than Margo Roth Spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me about how it's going with my girlfriend - but I don't give a shit man, because you're you. My parents have a shit ton of black Santas but that's okay. They're them. I'm too obsessed with a reference Web site to answer my phone sometimes when my friends call or my girlfriend. That's okay too. That's me. You like me anyway. And I like you."

"The funudamental mistake I had always made - and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make - was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl."

"I kept thinking about maps, like the way sometimes when I was a kid I would look at atlases, and jsut the looking was kinf of like being somewhere else. This is what I had to do. I had to hear and imagine my way into her map."

"I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite."

"Traveling, I am finding, teaches a lot of things about yourself."

"But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists."

Paper Towns - John Green