Paper Towns is the latest John Green book to be adapted for the big screen. In preparation for seeing the film, we re-read the book and realized that it is possibly his best work.
Paper Towns is the story of Quentin aka “Q” and his search for Margo Roth Spiegelman, his enigmatic neighbor who takes him on a revenge adventure only to disappear the next day. Q follows the clues Margo leaves behind and in the process learns something about himself and his friends. The mystery makes the book intriguing and the teenagers feel real, like you could walk into a high school and find each one of them. It is the vibe of the book and characters that, in our opinion, make this one of John Green’s best books.
Here are some of our favorite Paper Towns quotes that highlight the beauty of this book.
“’You just gotta tell her, man,’ I said. ‘You just gotta say, ‘Angela, I really like you, but there’s something you need to know: when we go to my house and hook up, we’ll be watched by the twenty-four hundred eyes of twelve hundred black Santas.’” (p. 22-23)
“Tonight, darling, we are going to right a lot of wrongs. And we are going to wrong some rights. The first shall be last; the last shall be first; the meek shall do some earth-inheriting. But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.”
(p. 30)
“‘My heart is really pounding,’ I said. ‘That’s how you know you’re having fun,’ Margo said. But it didn’t feel like fun; it felt like a heart attack.” (p. 44)
“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.” (p. 57)
“Those of us who frequent the band room have long suspected that Becca maintains her lovely figure by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished children.” (p. 38)
“Ben slowed for a stoplight and then turned around to look at Radar. ‘Bro,’ he said, ‘I think you guys are giving Margo Honeybunny way too much credit.’ ‘How’s that?’ I asked. ‘Unscrew the locks from the doors,’ he said. ‘Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said. The light turned green and Ben hit the gas. RHAPAW shuddered like she might disintegrate but then began to move. “It’s not poetry. It’s not metaphor. It’s instructions. We are supposed to go to Margo’s room and unscrew the lock from the door and unscrew the door itself from its jamb.”(p. 125)
“Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington’s house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.” (p. 140-141)
“And maybe this was what I needed to do above all. I needed to discover what Margo was like when she wasn’t being Margo.” (p. 170)
“I couldn’t figure out which of these ideas, if any, was at the core of the poem. But thinking about the grass and all the different ways you can see it made me think about all the ways I’d seen and mis-seen Margo. There was no shortage of ways to see her. I’d been focused on what had become of her, but now with my head trying to understand the multiplicity of grass and her smell from the blanket still in my throat, I realized that the most important question was who I was looking for. If “What is the grass?” has such a complicated answer, I thought, so, too, must “Who is Margo Roth Spiegelman?” Like a metaphor rendered incomprehensible by its ubiquity, there was room enough in what she had left me for endless imaginings, for an infinite set of Margos. (p. 173)
“Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.” (p. 199)
“I kept thinking about maps, like the way sometimes when I was a kid I would look at atlases, and just the looking was kind of like being somewhere else. This is what I had to do. I had to hear and imagine my way into her map.” (p. 216)
“And as paralyzing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final leaving felt perfect. Pure. The most distilled possible form of liberation.Everything that mattered except one lousy picture was in the trash, but it felt so great. I started jogging, wanting to put even more distance between myself and school. It is so hard to leave— until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”(p. 228)
“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.” (p. 304)
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