#50BooksInAYear Turtles All The Way Down by John Green

by Riya Roy · December 1, 2018

Before we talk about the book, let’s look at what The Globe And Mail had to say about it:

“A full-on emotional bleed-out…. John Green hasn’t created a book as much as he’s created a place—a place to have your most indefinable and grotesque thoughts articulated, to ponder the disconnected reality you experience . . . . No matter where you are on the spiral—and we’re all somewhere—Green’s novel makes the trip, either up or down, a less solitary experience.”

I devoured this book in under a day. It just spoke to me. I loved the characters, the writing is beautiful, and I think it is one of those few gems that speak of mental illness while not making you want to cringe.

A must read.

In today’s post, I will be sharing with you quotes from the Turtles All The Way Down that I loved and think you will too.

Quotes from Turtles All The Way Down

Reassuring, ain’t it?

“Your now is not your forever.”

Find someone who sees the same world you see

“We never really talked much or even looked at each other, but it didn’t matter because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe even more intimate than eye contact anyway. I mean, anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”

This!

“…no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.”

You are also your you

“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.”

Not having a choice is true terror

“True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice on the matter.”

Some things get better and some things get worse

“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.”

Be careful what you wish for

“The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.”

It just tightens, infinitely

“The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.”

This was the first line I highlighted in the book

“I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.”

You can love and be loved

“You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how and you become a person and why.”

I am a prisoner of my mind

“Actually, the problem is that I can’t lose my mind,” I said. “It’s inescapable.”

Your doubts make you real

“You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.”

You just get better questions

“What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.”

This book is the best way you can break your heart

“To be alive is to be missing.”

Every adult feels this way, I guess

“I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.”

You decide the frame

“No, it’s not, Holmesy. 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 the frame.”

All you can be in is love

“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.”

This!

“Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.”

You can only approach pain through metaphor

“One of the challenges with pain–physical or psychic–is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.”

The millennial life

“If only I were as good at life as I am at the internet.”

But I is a sentence in itself

“I is the hardest word to define.”

Everything is kind of irrelevant

“Whether it hurts is kind of irrelevant.”

Something like love

“Our hearts were broken in the same places. That’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.”

A story about illness is expected to be told in past tense

“Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.”

We cannot know what we cannot name

“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.”

Motto?

“Break hearts, not promises.”

There is hope, always

“There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.”

Power is wielding them

“Most adults are just hollowed out. You watch them try to fill themselves up with booze or money or God or fame or whatever they worship, and it all rots them from the inside until nothing is left but the money or the booze or God they though would save them. Adults think they are wielding power, but really power is wielding them.”

The stars surround us

“We always say we are beneath the stars. We aren’t, of course—there is no up or down, and anyway the stars surround us. But we say we are beneath them, which is nice. So often English glorifies the human—we are whos, other animals are that—but English puts us beneath the stars, at least.”

That is all we have on today’s post on Turtles All The Way Down by John Green. Did you like what you just read? Let us know in the comment section below.

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See you again next time.

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