Mass Quotes #8: Paper Towns & Let it Snow
This is the post I’ve been waiting to make for months featuring a lot of really cool quotes from John Green’s Paper Towns! Its official release date was today (though it hit shelves a week or two ago, because that’s how big chain stores are) and you should all read it. It is that amazing. I read it a few months ago as an ARC I borrowed from my librarian friend Heather and then today I went out & bought my own copy. This book has two covers & for now I have the happy Margo yellow cover, but in the future I hope to also get the sad Margo blue cover.
Look for a review of Paper Towns coming up on Typeset World next week because I will be reviewing this book for my school newspaper. Also keep an eye out for a post about how I met John Green, because I’m meeting him in a week!! 
(anyone else going to the Naperville event?)
Anyway, on with the quotes! SPOILERS AHEAD
Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much she became one.
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 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. 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.
-Margo Roth Speigelman
“I mean, 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.”
-Detective Otis Warren
“Yeah, so if that guy can make it in drunk, surely we can make it in sober. I mean, we’re ninjas.”
“Well, maybe you’re a ninja,” I said.
“You’re just a really loud, awkward ninja,” Margo said, “but we are both ninjas.”
“But it was the last string. It was a lame string, for sure, but it was the one I had left, and every paper girl needs at least one string, right?”
-Margo Roth Speigelman
It is so hard to leave–until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
————-
And now some extras, from Let it Snow:
I felt so alone on that train…a weird, unnatural kind of alone that bore into me. It was a feeling just beyond fear and somewhere to the left of sadness. Tired, but not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. It was dark and gloomy, and yet, it didn’t seem that things would get any better if the lights were turned up. If anything, I would be able to get a much better look at my unpleasant situation.
-Maureen Johnson, Let it Snow: The Jubilee Express
“I promise you that it will be okay,” the Duke said, her voice measured, quiet.
“You’re good at that,” I said. “At, like, saying crazy things in a way that makes me believe them.”
She stood up on her toes, grabbed me by the shoulders, and looked at me, her nose red and snow-wet, her face close to mine. “You do not like cheerleaders. You think they are lame. You like cute, funny, emo girls who I will enjoy hanging out with.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Yeah, that didn’t work,” I said.
“Damn it.” She smiled.
-John Green, Let it Snow: A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle
“Yeah, I’m already kind of cold,” she said, and then stood next to me, her side against mine. I couldn’t imagine how she could be cold beneath that gigantic ski coat, but it didn’t matter. It reminded me that at least I wasn’t alone out here. I reached up and mussed her hat as I put my arm around her.
“Duke, what are we gonna do?”
“This is probably more fun than Waffle House would be, anyway,” she said.
-John Green, Let it Snow: A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle
Mass Quotes #7
You play grown-up long enough and you lose your perspective on right and wrong. Why not put it off as long as possible?
-Nico, Zeb Wells, Civil War: Young Avengers/Runaways #4
Gert: I’m not buried in that plot, Karolina. Some woman claiming to be me from the future is.
Molly: Why do they call it a plot anyway?
Gert: Because this is how every story ends
-Brian K Vaughan, Runaways #19
He’s a thief. He knows the best security systems are the ones nearest to the bounty. But the human heart can’t accommodate logic. Though I should have realized–that it can overcompensate for it.
-X-Cutioner, Fabian Nicleza, Gambit #5
I kept pushing against the black, though, almost a reflux. I wasn’t trying to lift it. I was just resisting. Not allowing it to crush me completely. I wasn’t Atlas, and the black felt as heavy as a planet; I couldn’t shoulder it. All I could do was not be entirely obliterated.
-Bella, Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn
“You’ll still be Arthur Penhaligon,” she said. “Not the brightest, not the bravest, but up for anything. Least, that’s how I see you. Kind of like a little brother, only you’re taller than me now.”
-Suzy Turquoise Blue, Garth Nix, Superior Saturday
Arthur held the floats for a minute, thinking about something his mother had once said when she was explaining something to his sister Michaeli and didn’t know he was listening. There is never one absolutely right thing to do. All you can do is honor what you believe, accept the consequences of your own actions, and make the best out of whatever happens.
-Garth Nix, Superior Saturday
They move fast. They don’t pull their punches. Real nightmares never do.
-Ed Brubaker, Uncanny X-Men #501
Hisako: That doesn’t sound like such a good idea Mr. Summers.
Cyclops: We’re on mission time now. Codenames.
Hisako: Sorry. That sounds like we’re all going to die, Cyclops
-Warren Ellis, Astonishing X-Men #25
When we die, we come back different, like, with greener eyes, or as some far off star
-A Softer World
Mass Quotes #6
I still can’t post from Paper Towns. Sigh.
The next post will most likely be all quotes from Breaking Dawn, which I picked up at midnight last night, but am nowhere near finishing (I worked all day!). I will post a spoiler warning though. Here’s what I haven’t posted yet.
After that she spent a lot of time convincing herself that what you saw, even what you felt, had an unreliable relationship to what was actually there. What was actually there was reality, regardless of whether you saw it or how you felt about it.
-Ann Brashares, Forever in Blue, The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
“We are trapped in our senses,” her old teacher, Annik, told her once. “They are all we have of the world.”
And so they are the world, Lena remembered thinking then, and many times since.
-Ann Brashares, Forever in Blue, The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
Right now I’m having amnesia and déja vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.
-Steven Wright
“I know what it is,” she said. “We aren’t in Bethesda anymore and we aren’t in high school. We aren’t really in our families and we aren’t in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren’t us. If we think they are, then we’re lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren’t any place or any time.”
She thought of their Pants. She pictured them blowing off the laundry line and into the air, floating and soaring until they silently merged into sky and sea.
“That’s the thing. We are everywhere.”
-Carmen, Ann Brashares, Forever in Blue, the Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
“Faith is personal, you have to figure it out for yourself.”
-Mr. Raeburn, State of Grace
Mass Quotes #5
A lot of my current quotes in my notebook come from Paper Towns by John Green. But I read an ARC. The book does not come out until October and I don’t want to put any spoilers out there. So I’ll be nice and wait, impatiently. Fortunately for you though I have also been reading the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books and have plenty of quotes to share from those. But, as always, spoilers may be ahead, so continue with caution.
Bailey thought. “I’m afraid of time,” she answered. She was brave, unflinching in the big Cyclops eye of the camera. There was nothing prissy or self-conscious about Bailey. “I mean, I’m afraid of not having enough time,” she clarified, “Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I’m afraid of the quick judgments and mistakes that everybody makes. You can’t fix them without time. I’m afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies.”
-Ann Brashares, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Maybe it didn’t matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn’t matter if your friend was possibly dying.
Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.
-Ann Brashares, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
-E.L. Doctorow
“Like I said, I’m me…and you’re you. Who’s this or that doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about what Asuma said. Just be yourself.”
-Shikamaru, Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto 174
What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.
-Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
She thought about Mr. Kaligaris and all his theories about protecting his mother. Yes, smelling Greek food made Valia sad. He was right about that. And being held by another human seemed to make her sad too. But sometimes, Carmen knew, being sad was what you had to do.
-Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
-Norman Mailer
The real lesson embodied in Katherine’s three-year-old frame was opposite: Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway.
Flexing her feet under the covers, Tibby thought of a corollary to this lesson: If you don’t try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.
-Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
Please let this be real, she thought wistfully. And if it’s not, let me just stay here anyway.
-Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
She was still waiting for him to come back to her, even though he wasn’t going to. She was still holding out for something that wasn’t going to happen. She was good at waiting. That seemed like a sad thing to be good at.
Release me she begged, silently of her elephant.
She needed to be free of him. She needed to get on with her life. Maybe even fall in love again.
-Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
Mass Quotes #4
Today’s my last day of summer school, so hopefully I’ll be able to update this more often again. The good thing about summer school though is that I read a ton of amazing books for my children’s literature class, so I’ve got lots of new quotes for you. I’m waiting to take my children’s lit exam right now actually, so I don’t know how many I can post at the moment, but let’s find out.
“And even if you carry a survival kit around with you at all times, it won’t guarantee you’ll survive. No kit in the world can protect you from all the possible bad things.”
-Susan Patron, The Higher Power of Lucky
“The world is a wonderful place when you’re young.”
-Goose, E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
“I don’t think it’s normal. You know perfectly well animals don’t talk.”
Mr. Arable grinned. “Maybe our ears aren’t as sharp as Fern’s,” he said.
-E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults.
-Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Something was happening — no one was sure what. But out there back of beyond, far past the coastal ranges and the leagues of forest, the land changed and began opening to the sky.
-John Madson, Where the Sky Began
“Stand up and walk. Keep going forward. At least you have strong legs to take you there.”
-Ed, Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 1
“But you will be faced now,” she explained gently, “with a pain of a magnitude that none of us here can comprehend because it is beyond our experience. The Receiver himself was not able to describe it, only to remind us that you would be faced with it, that you would need immense courage. We cannot prepare you for that.
“But we feel certain that you are brave,” she said to him.
-Lois Lowry, The Giver
Rules and Things Number 83: If an adult tells you not to worry, and you weren’t worried before, you better hurry up and start ’cause you’re already running late.
-Christopher Paul Curtis, Bud, Not Buddy
“But Grandmamma,” I said, “if nobody has ever seen The Grand High Witch, how can you be so sure she exists?”
My grandmother gave me a long and very severe look. “Nobody has ever seen the Devil,” she said,” but we know he exists.”
-Roald Dahl, The Witches
I found myself thinking, What’s so wonderful about being a little boy anyway? Why is that necessarily any better than being a mouse? I know that mice get hunted and they sometimes get poisoned or caught in traps. But little boys sometimes get killed, too. Little boys can be run over by motor-cars or they can die of some awful illness. Little boys have to go to school. Mice don’t. Mice don’t have to pass exams. Mice don’t have to worry about money. Mice, as far as I can see, have only two enemies, humans and cats. My grandmother is a human, but I know for certain she will always love me whoever I am. And she never, thank goodness, keeps a cat. When mice grow up, they don’t ever have to go to war and fight against other mice. Mice, I felt pretty certain, all like each other. People don’t.
-Roald Dahl, The Witches
If you’re looking for good reads this summer I highly recommend all of these (except for Where the Sky Began, that’s a boring book about the prairie I had to read for Eco). I’m having trouble deciding if my new favorite children’s book is The Witches, if it’s The Higher Power of Lucky, or if it will continue to be Through the Looking Glass. Probably Looking Glass, but the other two are definitely vying for second place.
Mass Quotes #3
Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.
-Lewis Carroll
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.”
-Lewis Carroll,
Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
-E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
“You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.
-E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
I am in earnest–I will not equivocate–I will not excuse–I will not retreat a single inch–and I will be heard.
-William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator
I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.
-Frederick Douglas
Just the sound of those chimes made Lucky feel cooler. But she still had doubts and anxious questions in all the crevices of her brain, especially about how to find her Higher Power.
If she could only find it, Lucky was pretty sure she’d be able to figure out the difference between the things she could change and the things she couldn’t, like in the little prayer of the anonymous people. Because sometimes Lucky wanted to change everything, all the bad things that had happened, and sometimes she wanted everything to stay the same forever.
-Susan Patron, The Higher Power of Lucky
Then that sign that still said POP. 43 would really be wrong. But what Lucky wanted most was for that sign to stay the same forever, with no subtracting allowed.
-Susan Patron, The Higher Power of Lucky
Life; MT Anderson
“I’m looking up at my leg. I’m moving my toes, squelching them. That’s a great feeling, squelching, like in mud? When it’s in your yard? And you know the day’s going to get hot again when the rain’s over, because that’s what the neighborhood association has decided? So you can just stand there, and wait for the sun?
“And it’s your time on Earth, I mean, your hundred years, that’s all you have, so there you are, on Earth, a little kid, the one time you’ll be a little kid, and you’re standing, waiting for the artificial sun, and feeling the mud, and at that point, your toes still work perfectly. So you stand there, and you squelch your toes, and you raise your arms up above your head, and you watch the clouds get sucked back into ducts in the sky. And that’s it. That’s an afternoon.
“That’s all.”
-Violet, MT Anderson, Feed
Directions; Chinese Proverb
“If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.”
-Chinese proverb
Anything’s Possible; JK Rowling
You sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.
-JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Encouragement; Winnie the Pooh
Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.
