Paper Towns John Green Quotes

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Cracked Darkness “It’s a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all these 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.” (Green Pg. 57) “Paper Towns”, by John Green, is a novel about a boy named Quentin Jacobson, who has spent a life time loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar, so when she cracks open a window into his life, he follows. John Green portrays throughout the novel that sometimes we get too caught up with the mystery and the assumptions we make of a person, and when our vision and reality crash we realize that the reality could never hold up to it.…show more content…
Quentin tries to figure out who the ‘real’ Margo is over the course of the novel, following the clues she left him when she ran away. When Quentin is having dinner with his parents, he overhears their conversation and notices how although his parents try to teach him to never judge other people, yet they still judge others at times, and he thinks to himself, “Isn’t it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.” (Green Pg. 198) “Paper Towns” alerts us to something that is easy to overlook. We all understand that we tend to dehumanize our so-called enemies, and so it’s easier to watch out for that. But it’s harder to watch out for the fact that we can also dehumanize the people we admire or love, by idealizing and imagining them to be perfect. We don’t allow them any emotions that don’t confirm to our mental picture of them. There is also other evidence proving the theme. When Quentin and his friends were on their way to find Margo, Ben one of Quentin’s friend who stays by his side in his journey, tells him, “Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are. People are different when you can smell them and see them up close.” (Green Pg.266) Ben is trying to tell Quentin, what he thinks and imagines Margo to be, might not be who she really is after all. It’s all just his imagination, which is of course limited, so it’s good to have in mind that there are things beyond what we can imagine; and we cannot limit people to what we comprehend. These quotes prove the thesis, they show how in the resolution of the novel the characters stop idealizing, and start seeing

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