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8 Brilliant Quotes from John Green’s Turtles All The Way Down

Holly Genovese

Staff Writer

Holly Genovese is a Ph.D student in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also completing graduate portfolio programs in African and African Diaspora studies, as well as Women's and Gender Studies. Her writing has been published in Teen Vogue, The Washington Post, Electric Literature, The La Review of Books, Literary Hub, Hello Giggles, and many other places.

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8 Brilliant Quotes from John Green's Turtles All The Way Down | BookRiot.comI love John Green. And I love him for many reasons even if he has done his bit to further the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope and often writes privileged white characters. I love John Green because of his fantastic (and sometimes corny) pearls of wisdom and most recently for being the only author to ever capture my brand of anxiety disorder so well. So here are some great quotes from John Green in his newest book, Turtles All The Way Down.

 

 

  1. “We are about to live the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else’s misfortune.”
  2. [T]his universal truth “the whole problem with boys is that 99% of them are, like, okay, if you could dress and hygiene them properly, and make them stand up straight, and listen to you and not be dumbasses, they’d be totally acceptable.
  3. Hitting us with the hard truth. “The thing is, when you lose someone, you realize you’ll eventually lose everyone.”
  4. “[T]o be alive is to be missing.”
  5. “[T]he world is also the stories we tell about it.”
  6. “[L]ife is a series of choices between wonders.”
  7. “I wanted to tell her it was getting better, because that was supposed to be 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.”
  8. “Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.”

What are your favorite quotes from John Green?