#owns

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 #miracles

If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#put-downs #stupidity #brain

Mousedung! ↗

— Erin Hunter

#insults #put-downs #insult

What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#bookstore #towns #books

And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn'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 #pleasure

I'm an agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service. I do not do booby traps. ↗

— Ally Carter

#townsend #service

We're not going to break anything. Don't think of it as breaking in to SeaWorld. Think of it as visiting SeaWorld in the middle of the night for free. ↗

— John Green

#margo #paper #seaworld #towns #sea

I have never really thought of him as a person, either.... A guy whose strings were broken, who didn’t feel the root of his leaves of grass connected to the field, a guy who was cracked. Like me. ↗

— John Green

#connection

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

#sky

They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly. "Oh, comply!" it said. "Think of his misery; think of his danger — look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair — soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?" Still indomitable was the reply — "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad — as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth — so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am quite insane — quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#love