Top 10 Turtles All the Way Down Quotes

This month, I read John Green’s new novel, and oh my god I loved it so much. If you’ve read my review about it, you know just how much I’m in love with this book.

Fact: My copy is filled with post-its because all the lines in this novel are just too perfect.

So I figured it was worth doing a post of my top 10 favorite quotes in this beautiful novel. Here they are:

10.

I didn’t know if I should hug him, and he didn’t seem to 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.

9.

I can no more choose my thoughts than my name.

8.

“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.

7.

(…) if you’re most people, you think, Well, that was a weird thought, and move on with your life. But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all the other thoughts until it’s the only one you’re able to have, the thought you’re perpetually either thinking or distracting yourself from.

6.

Maybe you are what you can’t not be.

5.

When I was little, I knew monsters weren’t, like, real. But I also knew you could be hurt by things that weren’t real.

4.

The words used to describre it–despair, fear, anxiety, obsession–do so little to communicate it. Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain.

3.

When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it. And I wanted to tell him that the idea of being in a feeling gave language to something I couldn’t describe before, created a form for it, but I couldn’t figure out how to say that out loud.

2.

Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.

1. SPOILER ALERT, MY FAVOURITE QUOTE IS THE LAST SENTENCE OF THE NOVEL. ❤

You stare up at the same sky together, and after a while he says, I have to go, and you say, Good-bye, and he says, Good-by, Aza, and no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.