Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

Rating: 7/10

That’s something I was open to and a topic I am certainly interested in learning more about, so I picked it up. Yes, it’s YA fodder; but it’s also a well written novel with an engaging plot. A quick, fun read.

Anxiety, loss, pain

• Your now is not your forever.
• The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.
• an unwanted thought was like a car driving past you when you’re standing on on the side of the road, and I told myself I didn’t have to get into that car, that my moment of choice was not whether to have the thought, but whether to be carried away by it. And then I got in the car.
• I felt certain something was going to kill me, and of course I was right: Something is going to kill you, someday, and you can’t know if this is the day.
• The way he talked about thoughts was the way I experienced them — not as a choice, but as a destiny. Not a catalog of my consciousness, but a refutation of it.
• I have these thoughts that Dr. Karen Singh calls “intrusives” but the first time she said it, I heard “invasives,” which I like better, because, like invasive weeds, these thoughts seem to arrive at my biosphere from some faraway land, and then they speed out of control. Supposedly everyone has them–you look out from over a bridge or whatever and it occurs to you out of nowhere that you could just jump. And then if you’re most people, you think, Well, that was a weird thought, and move on with your life. But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all other thoughts until it’s the only one you’re able to have, the thought you’re perpetually either thinking or distracting yourself from.
• It’s not like that. The sentence doesn’t have, like, an object. I’m just scared. [When Aza was asked what she was scared of.]
• True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.
• 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.
• There’s no need to suffer. Which I’d argue is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the human predicament, but okay.
• Imagine you’re trying to find someone, or even you’re trying to find yourself, but you have no senses, no way to know where the walls are which way is forward or backward, what is water and what is air. You’re senseless and shapeless—you feel like you can only describe what you are by identifying what you’re not, and you’re floating around in a body with no control. You don’t get to decide who you like or where you live or when you eat or what you fear. You’re just stuck in there, totally alone, in this darkness. That’s scary.
• “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” — William James
• Our hearts were broken in the same places. That’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.
• It’s turtles all the way fucking down, Holmesy. You’re trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that’s not how it works.
• I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.
  Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.
• Him: And the thing is, when you lose someone, you realise you’ll eventually lose everyone
  Me: True. And once you know that, you can never forget it.
• 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.
• Every loss is unprecedented.
• ‘You know Sekou Sundiata, in a poem, he said the most important part of the body ‘ain’t the heart or the lungs or the brain. The biggest, most important part of the body is the part that hurts.’
• I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache…The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’ And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless,inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.
• Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain. Maybe we needed to give shape to the opaque, deep-down pain that evades both sense and senses.
• Actually, the problem is that I can’t lose my mind,” I said. “It’s inescapable.”
• you give your thoughts too much power, Aza. Thoughts are only thoughts. They are not you. You do belong to yourself, even when your thoughts don’t.
• Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.
• I was a story riddled with plot holes.
• If taking a pill makes you different, like, if it changes the way-down you… that’s just a screwed up idea, you know? Who’s deciding what me means — me or the employees of the factory that make Lexapro?
• There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.

Life

• 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. You think, I now choose to go to lunch, when that monotone beep rings from high at 12:37. But really, the bell decides. You think that you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas.
• no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.
• A fuller formation of Descartes’s philosophy would be Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. ‘I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.’ Descartes wanted to know if you could really know that anything was real, but he believed his ability to doubt reality proved that, while it might not be real, he was.
  You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.
• Being vulnerable is asking to get used.
• You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don’t choose what’s in the picture, but you decide the frame.
• Most adults are just hollowed out. You watch them try to fill themselves up with booze or money or God or fame or whatever they worship, and it all rots them from the inside until nothing is left but the money or the booze or God they though would save them. Adults think they are wielding power, but really power is wielding them.
• Love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift.
• I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me.
• 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.
• Life is a series of choices between wonders.
• The point of the story is they built the city anyway, you know? You work with what you have. they had this shit river, and they managed to build an okay city around it. Not a great city, maybe. But not bad. You’re not the river. You’re the city.
• The problem with happy endings 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.
• My whole life I though I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along.
• There’s an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that’s been rumbling around inside me ever since I first read it, and part of it goes: ‘Blown from the dark hill hither to my door/ Three flakes, then four/ Arrive, then many more.’ You can count the first three flakes, and the fourth. Then language fails, and you have to settle in and try to survive the blizzard
• You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person and why.
• It’s not how you die. It’s who you die.
• Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.
• I don’t mind worriers,” I said. “Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.

Family

• You don’t know a father’s weight until it’s lifted.
• if you have a perfectly tuned guitar and a perfectly tuned violin in the same room, and you pluck the D string of a guitar, then all the way across the room, the D string on the guitar will also vibrate. I could always feel my mother’s vibrating strings.

General

• 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 or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love.
• If only I were as good at life as I am at the internet.
• We are about to live the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else’s misfortune.
• What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.
• We always say we are beneath the stars. We aren’t, of course—there is no up or down, and anyway the stars surround us. But we say we are beneath them, which is nice. So often English glorifies the human—we are whos, other animals are that—but English puts us beneath the stars, at least.
• I have the soul of a private jet owner, and the life of a public transportation rider. It’s a real tragedy.
• she told me that beauty was mostly a matter of attention. “The river is beautiful because you are looking at it,
• The madness of wealth. Sometimes you think you’re spending the money, but all along the money’s spending you. But only if you worship it. You serve whatever you worship.
• Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.
• “There’s an expression in classical music. It goes, ‘We went out to the meadow.’ It’s for those evenings that can only be described in that way: There were no walls, there were no music stands, there weren’t even any instruments. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, we all went out to the meadow. It describes a feeling.” – Tom Waits
• Photographs are just light and time,
• In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It felt like we were in some place your body can’t visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments
• When you’re on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that. Nobody who’s doing it ever talks about anything else.
• Look up long enough and you start to feel your infinitesimality. The difference between alive and not — that’s something. But from where the stars are watching, there is almost no difference between varieties of alive, between me and the newly mown grass I’m lying on right now. We are both astonishments, the closest thing in the know universe to a miracle.