B. Paper Towns

Paper Towns

Highlights

We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous. — location: 282

identicalness — location: 366

ilk — location: 426

incontestably — location: 454

“Yeah. I’m a big believer in random capitalization. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle.” — location: 467

lo — location: 527

“That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste. — location: 538

vapid, — location: 544

hacienda — location: 675

faux — location: 720

duly — location: 728

“Here’s what’s not beautiful about it: from here, you can’t see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.” — location: 807

depilatated — location: 866

usurped,” — location: 868

mum — location: 936

masochistic — location: 1001

“I guess the pleasure isn’t being inside.” “What’s the pleasure?” I asked. “Planning, I guess. I don’t know. Doing stuff never feels as good as you hope it will feel.” — location: 1083

ambled — location: 1168

sestina — location: 1190

jaunt — location: 1248

salacious — location: 1328

coiffed — location: 1606

I always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring. — location: 1768

But as I went about my routine that night and the next day at school, it ate away at me, as if the routine itself was taking me farther from reuniting with her. — location: 1770

razzing — location: 1774

basest — location: 1911

I mean, at some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too.” — location: 2050

cavalier — location: 2082

intimation — location: 2094

plaintive — location: 2149

stag.” — location: 2223

I had to narrow her down, and I figured there had to be things here that I was seeing wrong or not seeing. I wanted to tear off the roof and light up the whole place so that I could see it all at once, instead of one flashlight beam at a time. — location: 2348

It all seemed so trivial, so embarrassing. It all seemed like paper kids having their paper fun. — location: 2413

savant — location: 2426

You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. — location: 2642

“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.” — location: 2700

asbestos.” — location: 2772

pseudonyms. — location: 2774

obfuscation. — location: 2828

She’d had good days here. And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me. These whitewashed cinder-block walls. My white walls. Margo’s white walls. We’d been captive in them for so long, stuck in their belly like Jonah. — location: 3090

It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world. — location: 3112

travelogue. — location: 3122

effusive — location: 3150

the secret of leaving, the secret I have only just now learned: leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can’t do that until your life has grown roots. — location: 3177

eponymous — location: 3190

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. — location: 3481

schleps — location: 3663

halcyon — location: 3710

What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person. — location: 3829

suburbanality — location: 3907

I could stand up and go to her and kiss her. I could. But there is still too much to be ruined. — location: 3956

congenital — location: 4021

“Forever is composed of nows,” she says. I have nothing to say to that; I am just chewing through it when Margo says, “Emily Dickinson. Like I said, I’m doing a lot of reading.” — location: 4031

“But then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.” Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo’s anger at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists. — location: 4079

I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.” — location: 4107