Turtle’s All The Way Down

by John Green

• The complexity of the universe is something that scientists continue to explore, and we may never have all the answers. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Not knowing the answer to a question is not a valid excuse for making up a fairytale to explain it.

• Something is going to kill you, someday, and you can’t know if this is the day.

• Life is a series of choices between wonders. In the best conversations, youdon’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt.

• What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.

• 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.

• All people in relationships ever do is talk about their relationship status. It’s like a ferris wheel.

• It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else - in friendship, in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.

• What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.

• Adults think they’re weilding power, but really power is weilding them. The parasite believes itself to be the host.

• One of the challenges with pain - physical or psychic - is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be respresented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.