The oh-so-quotable New York Times bestselling author John Green has done it again! Here are our some of our favorite Turtles All the Way Down quotes!
Turtles All The Way Down by John Green tells the story of 16-year-old Aza Holmes with obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety who gets wrapped up in trying to solve a mystery. Along with her best friend, Daisy Ramirez, the two try to figure out what happened to billionaire Russell Pickett who went missing.
Turtles All The Way Down was published on October 10, 2017, and became John Green’s fifth solo novel, and his seventh overall. It was the first book that he had published since his 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars.
While the story is fictional, John Green used inspiration from his own life of growing up with mental illness. Along with helping people to better understand living with mental illness, these Turtles All The Way Down quotes show how great a writer the author is.
Check out some of our favorite Turtles All the Way Down quotes below!
Related: Turtles All the Way Down review: John Green is back, ladies and gents
John Green ‘Turtles All the Way Down’ quotes:
Enjoy reading through these Turtles All the Way Down quotes to see just how good this book is.
🐢 “The way he talked about thoughts was the way I experienced them – not as a choice but as a destiny. Not a catalog of my consciousness, but a refutation of it.” – Aza Holmes, page 59
🐢 “Our lunch table was like a long-running play on Broadway: The cast changed over the years, but the roles never did.” – Aza Holmes, page 2
🐢 “Life is a series of choices between wonders.” – Davis Pickett, page 188
🐢 “I apologize for the double negative, but it’s a real double negative of a situation, a bind from which negating the negation is truly the only escape.” – Aza Holmes, page 6
🐢 “No one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.” – Davis Pickett, page 59
🐢 “I don’t like to throw the L-word around; it’s too good and rare a feeling to cheapen with overuse.” – Aza Holmes, page 13
🐢 “I am listening to the cacophony of my digestive tract.” – Aza Holmes, page 3
🐢 “I’ve got a theory about uniforms. I think they design them so that you become, like, a nonperson, so that you’re not Daisy Ramirez, a Human Being, but instead a thing that brings people pizza and exchanges their tickets for plastic dinosaurs. It’s like the uniform is designed to hide me.” – Daisy Ramirez, page 20
🐢 “The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.” Aza Holmes, page 7
🐢 “I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.” – Aza Holmes, page 25
🐢 “A distressed damsel has no companions.” – Daisy Ramirez, page 28
🐢 “What was my part in this play? The Sidekick. I was Daisy’s Friend, or Ms. Holmes’s Daughter. I was somebody’s something.” – Aza Holmes, page 2
🐢 “I didn’t know if I should hug him, and he didn’t know if he should hug me, so we just sort of stood there not touching, which to be honest is my preferred form of greeting.” – Aza Holmes, page 31
🐢 “I think about her all the time. My stomach flips when I see her. But is it love, or just something we don’t have a word for?” – Davis Pickett, page 58
🐢 “I would’ve told her that Davis and I never 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 more intimate than eye contact anyway. Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.” – Aza Holmes, page 9
🐢 “But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same person if she has a boyfriend or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school?” – Aza Holmes, page 165
🐢 “Nothing says fuck you to your kids quite like leaving your fortune to a lizard.” – Daisy Ramirez, page 44
🐢 “I was a story riddled with plot holes.” – Aza Holmes, page 253
🐢 “I started thinking about turtles all the way down. I was thinking that maybe the old lady and the scientist were both right. Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.” – Aza Holmes, page 257
🐢 “I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name.” – Davis Pickett, page 59
🐢 “And he was obviously a person. Like, what even makes you a person? He had a body and a soul and feelings, and he spoke a language, and he was an adult, and if he and Rey were in hot, hairy, communicative love, then let’s just thank God that two consenting, sentient adults found each other in a dark and broken galaxy.” – Daisy Ramirez, page 66
🐢 “Your now is not your forever.” – Ms. Holmes, page 93
🐢 “You can live a good life without ever knowing real love, of the Corinthians variety, but I was fortunate to have found it with Harold.” – Aza Holmes, page 13
🐢 “When you lose someone, you realize you’ll eventually lose everyone.” – Davis Pickett, page 81
🐢 “I don’t mind worriers. Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.” – Aza Holmes, page 52
🐢 “I wanted to tell her that I 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.” – Aza Holmes, page 85
🐢 “Adolescent sanity is so twentieth century.” – Aza Holmes, page 87
🐢 “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, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.” – Dr. Singh, page 89
🐢 “Sometimes makeup feels kind of like armor.” – Aza Holmes, page 94
🐢 “Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself.” – Aza Holmes, page 105
🐢 “I find mental disorders to be vastly overrated.” – Aza Holmes, page 133
🐢 “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 you become a person, and why.”- Aza Holmes, page 285
🐢 “I felt like I might end up anywhere, and imagining all the futures I might have, all the Azas I might become, was a glorious and welcome vacation from living with the me I currently was.” – Aza Holmes, page 138
🐢 “True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.” – Aza Holmes, page 22
🐢 “Let’s continue this awkward silence in person.” – Davis Pickett, page 134
🐢 “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.” – Aza Holmes, page 276
🐢 “Maybe you’ve been in love. I mean real love, the kind my grandmother used to describe by quoting Paul’s First letter to the Corinthians, the love that is kind and patient, that does not envy or boast, that beareth all things and believeth all things and endureth all things.” – Aza Holmes, page 13
🐢 “It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in.” – Aza Holmes, page 149
🐢 “Nobody ever says anything is too bad to be true.” – Aza Holmes, page 108
🐢 “Every loss is unprecedented. You can’t ever know someone else’s hurt, not really – just like touching someone else’s body isn’t the same as having someone else’s body.” – Aza Holmes, page 174
🐢 “I’m not sure why, but I’ve always been pretty keen on the male forearm.” – Aza Holmes, page 95
🐢 “‘Just be honest with Dr. Singh, okay? There’s no need to suffer.’ Which I’d argue is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the human predicament, but okay.” – Ms. Holmes and Ava Holmes, page 70
🐢 “So often English glorifies the human – we are whos, other animals are thats – but English puts us beneath the stars, at least.” – Davis Pickett, page 187
🐢 ‘She noted, more than once, that the meteor shower was happening, beyond the overcast sky, even if we could not see it. Who cares if she can kiss? She can see through the clouds.” – Davis Pickett, page 189
🐢 “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 a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.” – Dr. Singh, page 89
🐢 “From where the stars are watching, there is almost no difference between varieties of alive, between me and the newly mown grass I’m lying on right now. We are both astonishments, the closest thing in the known universe to a miracle.” – Davis Pickett, page 185
🐢 “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.” – Aza Holmes, page 257
🐢 “I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.” – Aza Holmes, page 1
🐢 “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 on the frame.” – Daisy Ramirez, page 277
🐢 “I guess at some point, you realize whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can’t actually protect you from getting hurt.” – Davis Pickett, page 147
You can learn more about New York Times bestselling author John Green and his novels on his official website!