Paper Towns, by John Green, is about high school seniors Margo and Quinton.
When they were nine, they shared an experience that created a unique bond.
Margo and Quentin have not interacted with each other until one night.
Margo enlists Quentin to help her with her eleven-part revenge plot against friends who wronged her.
During the last few weeks of high school, Margo disappears. She leaves clues for Quentin to find her.
Paper Towns Quotes With Page Numbers Part One: The Strings
“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Prologue, Page 1
“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the Queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Prologue, Page 3
“Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Prologue, Page 8
“She loved mysteries so much that she became one.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Prologue, Page 8
“Nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part One, Chapter 1, Page 18
“Radar threw his books into his locker and shut it. Then the din of conversation around us quieted just a bit as he turned his eyes toward the heavens and shouted, “IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD’S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part One, Chapter 1, Page 22
“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.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part One, Chapter 2, Page 30
“The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part One, Chapter 3, Page 32
“Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future–you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Chapter 3, Page3 33, 34
“That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part One, Chapter 4, Page 37
“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.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part One, Chapter 4, Page 38
“My heart is really pounding,” I said.
“That’s how you know you’re having fun,” Margo said.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part One, Chapter 4, Page 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 can 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 culs-de-sac, 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.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part One, Chapter 6, Page 57
“It was nice – in the dark and the quiet… and her eyes looking back, like there was something in me worth seeing.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part One, Chapter 7, Page 66
“I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Chapter 8, Page 70
“Maybe all the strings inside him broke.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part one, Chapter 8, Page 71
“And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for mewasn’t planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Chapter 8, Page 78
Quotes From Paper Towns Part Two: The Grass
“Poetry is just so emo.” he said. “Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part Two, Chapter 4, Page 114
“Dude, I don’t want to talk about Lacey’s prom shoes. And I’ll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It’s called a penis.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part Two, Chapter Seven, Page 132
“YOU WILL GO TO THE PAPER TOWNS
AND YOU WILL NEVER COME BACK”~John Green, Paper Towns, Part Two, Chapter 9, Page 149
“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.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Chapter 10, Page 151
“Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Chapter 13, Page 181
“Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Chapter 13, Page 183
“You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than Margo Roth Spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me about how it’s going with my girlfriend – but I don’t give a shit, man, because you’re you. My parents have a shit ton of black Santas, but that’s okay. They’re them. I’m too obsessed with a reference website to answer my phone sometimes when my friends call, or my girlfriend. That’s okay, too. That’s me. You like me anyway. And I like you. You’re funny, and you’re smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Chapter 14, Page 194
“The more I realize that people lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, & so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Chapter 15, Page 198
“Isn’t it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Chapter 15, Page 198
“And all at once I knew how Margo Roth Spiegelman felt when she wasn’t being Margo Roth Spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the unscaleable wall surrounding her. I thought of her asleep on the carpet with only that jagged sliver of sky above her. Maybe Margo felt comfortable there because Margo the person lived like that all the time: in an abandoned room with blocked-out windows, the only light pouring in through holes in the roof. Yes. The fundamental mistake I had always made—and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make—was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Chapter 15, Page 199
“The town was paper, but the memories were not.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Chapter 19, Page 227
“This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part Two, Chapter 19, Page 228
“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest…thing in the world.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Chapter 19, Page 229
“I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part Two, Chapter 19, Page 229
“The pleasure isn’t in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part Two, Chapter 20, Page 233
“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.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part Two, Chapter 20, Page 234
Paper Towns Part Three Quotes: The Vessel
“It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part Three, Hour Six, Page 257
“Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour – but in face I am that kind of person.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part Three, Hour Eight, Page 260
“Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are… People are different when you can smell them and see them up close…”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Hour Twelve, Page 266
“As long as we don’t die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part Three, Hour Twenty, Page 278
“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Part Three, Hour Twenty-One, Page 282
“As much as life can suck, it always beats the alternative.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Algoe, Page 287
“A paper town for a paper girl.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Algoe, Page 293
“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”
I know what she’s talking about. The something deeper and more secret. It’s like cracks inside of you. Like there are these fault lines where things don’t meet up right.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Algoe, Page 294
“Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Algoe, Page 299
“If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Algoe, Page 299
“Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside someone else…But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Algoe, Page 299
“I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Algoe, Page 301
“I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Algoe, Page 301
“Maybe it’s more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen – these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack in places. And I mean, yeah once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And its only that time that we see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Algoe, Page 302
“When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Algoe, Page 302
“I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I’ve never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero’s errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Algoe, Page 304
“We Play the broken string of our instruments one last time”
~John Green, Paper Towns, Algoe, Page 305
More John Green quotes:
The Fault In Our Stars Quotes With Page Numbers
Looking For Alaska Quotes With Page Numbers
Paper Towns Summary
John Green’s novel “Paper Towns” follows Quentin Jacobsen as he explores self-discovery while searching for his childhood friend, Margo Roth Spiegelman.
Margo approaches Quentin one night with a plan for revenge against her ex-boyfriend and then disappears the next day. Quentin believes Margo has left clues for him to find her and begins the search to track her down.
During his journey, he discovers the truth about Margo and the importance of friendship, love, and understanding. Along the way, Quentin realizes that people are rarely what they seem and everyone is on their journey.