Turtles All the Way Down Quotes

“To be alive is to be missing.”

“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.”

“I is the hardest word to define.”

“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to paint, photograph or even remember it. It is enough.”

“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.”

“The problem with happy endings, I said, 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.”

“That’s what my dad is like-he really disappeared a long time ago, which is maybe why it didn’t bother me much.”

“And if you can’t pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren’t really real, you know? Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself.”

“For the record, he who does fear death also dies only once, but whatever.”

“Thoughts are just a different kind of bacteria, colonizing you. I thought about the gut-brain information axis. Maybe you’re already gone. The prisoners run the jail now. Not a person so much as a swarm. Not a bee, but the hive.”

“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.”

“You and I are just kids. We’ve got the best and the worst of it in front of us”

“You seemed locked inside of your mind, and I can’t know what’s going on in there, and it scared me.”

“We never really 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 even more intimate than eye contact anyway. I mean, anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”

“True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice on the matter.”

“Even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.”

“You’d think solving mysteries would bring you closure, that closing the loop would comfort and quiet your mind. But it never does. The truth always disappoints.”

“But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell. Of course, you pretend to be the author. You have to.”

“Yes, well, in that respect and many others, American high schools do rather resemble prisons.”

“Adults think they’re wielding power, but really power is wielding them”