Paper Towns Margo Quotes

Maybe all the strings inside him broke.

Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will

YOU WILL GO TO THE PAPER TOWNS AND YOU WILL NEVER COME BACK

You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than Margo Roth Spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me about how it's going with my girlfriend - but I don't give a shit, man, because you're you. My parents have a shit ton of black Santas, but that's okay. They're them. I'm too obsessed with a reference website to answer my phone sometimes when my friends call, or my girlfriend. That's okay, too. That's me. You like me anyway. And I like you. You're funny, and you're smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually.

Tonight, darling, we are going to right a lot of wrongs. And we are going to wrong some rights. The first shall be last; the last shall be first; the meek shall do some earth-inheriting. But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the Queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.

And all at once I knew how Margo Roth Spiegelman felt when she wasn't being Margo Roth Spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the unscaleable wall surrounding her. I thought of her asleep on the carpet with only that jagged sliver of sky above her. Maybe Margo felt comfortable there because Margo the person lived like that all the time: in an abandoned room with blocked-out windows, the only light pouring in through holes in the roof. Yes. 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.

My heart is really pounding," I said. "That's how you know you're having fun," Margo said.

I mean, we're ninjas." "Well maybe you're a ninja," I said "You're just a really loud, awkward ninja," Margo said, "but we are both ninjas.

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.

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.

A Margo for each of us--and each more mirror than window.

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will… but then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all. Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside someone else… But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills the fascists

Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

I shaved this morning for precisely that reason. I was like, 'Well, you never know when someone is going to clamp down on your calf and try to suck out the snake poison.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

Q, you're going to go to Duke. You're going to be a very successful lawyer-or-something and get married and have babies and live your whole little life, and then you're going to die, and in the last moments, when you're chocking on your own bile in the nursing home, you'll say to yourself:'Well, I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman my senior year of high school. At least I carpe'd that one diem.

The sky is like a monochromatic contemporay painting, drawing me in its illusion of depth, pulling me up.

And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future-you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.

That doesn't sound like my Margo", she said, and I thought of my Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different funhouse mirrors.

And then, in boating supplies, Margo located an air horn. She took it out of the box and held it up in the air, and I said, "No," and she said, "No what?" And I said, "No don't blow the air horn," except when I got to the b in blow, she squeezed on it and it let out an excruciatingly loud honk that felt in my head like the auditory equivalent of an aneurysm, and then she said, "I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. What was that?" And I said, "Stop b-" and then she did it again.

Because Margo knows the secret of leaving, the secret I have only just now learned; leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.

Its a paper town, with paper houses and paper people, everything is uglier up close.

It's a penis," Margo said, "in the same sense that Rhode Island is a state: it may have an illustrious history, but it sure isn't big.

Physical space between us evaporates. We play the broken strings of our instruments one last time

I always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring. I doubted I could explain it to someone like Margo but drawing circles through life struck me as a kind of reasonable insanity.

You can’t divorce Margo the person from Margo the body. You can’t see one without seeing the other. You looked at Margo’s eyes and you saw both their blueness and their Margo-ness. In the end, you could not say that Margo Roth Spiegelman was fat, or that she was skinny, any more than you can say that the Eiffel Tower is or is not lonely. Margo’s beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection – uncracked and uncrackable.

As we walked, I kept taking glances at her through the crowd, quick snapshots: a photographic series entitled Perfection Stands Still While Mortals Walk Past.

I'm a big believer in random capitalization. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to the words in the middle. (32)

Margo was so beautiful that even her fake smiles were convincing. (54)

To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.

But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all. Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo's anger at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in.

Margo says, "I know what she's talking about. The something deeper and more secret. It's like cracks inside of you. Like there are these fault lines where things don't meet up right.

You were with Margo Roth Spiegelman last night? At THREE A.M.? I nodded. Alone? I nodded. Oh my God, if you hooked up with her, you have to tell me every single thing that happened. You have to write me a term paper on the look and feel of Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts. Thrity pages, minimum! I want you to do a photo-realistic pencil drawing. A sculpture would also be acceptable. I was wondering if it would be possible for you to write a sestina about Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts? Your six words are: pink, round, firmness, succulent, supple, and pillowy. Personally, I think at least one of the words should be buhbuhbuhbuh.

And I don't really have anyone upon whom I want to rain down my wrath," I said, because in truth I didn't. I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies. Example: Historically, Germany has had more enemies than Luxembourg, Margo Roth Spiegelman was Germany. And Great Britain. And the United States. And czarist Russia. Me, I'm Luxembourg. Just sitting around, tending sheep, and yodeling.

Everything's uglier close up -Margo Roth Spiegelman

I always got very nervous whenever I heard that Margo was about to show up, on account of how she was the most fantastically gorgeous creature that God has ever created.

She loved so much misteries tha she became one

But there she is, and I am watching her through the Plexiglas, and she looks like Margo Roth Spiegelman, this girl I have known since I was two--this girl who was an idea that I loved.

With all the planning she’d done, she must have known she was leaving, and even she couldn’t have been totally immune to the feeling. She’d had good days here. And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me. These whitewashed cinder-block walls. My white walls. Margo’s white walls. We’d been captive in them for so long, stuck in their belly like Jonah.

I like the strings. I always have. Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is, I think. We're not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me to imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well – but never quite perfectly, you know?

You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean look at it Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people too.

I had not cried for Margo until then, but now finally I did, pounding against the ground and shouting because there was no on to hear: I missed her I missed her I missed her I miss her.

I laugh, but I'm still thinking about ten-year-old Margo having a crush on ten-year-old me.

As I followed Margo's directions through the maze of one-way streets, we saw a few people sleeping on the sidewalk or sitting on benches, but nobody was moving. Margo rolled down the window, and I felt the thick air blow across my face, warmer than night ought to be. I glanced over and saw strands of her hair blowing all around her face. Even though I could see her there, I felt entirely alone among these big and empty buildings, like I'd survived the apocalypse and the world had been given to me, this whole and amazing and endless world, mine for the exploring.

Margo no era un milagro. Ella no era una aventura. No era una cosa bella y preciosa. Era una chica.

Margo's beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection--uncracked and uncrackable.

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never get struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.

In the end, you could not say that Margo Roth Spiegelman was fat, or that she was skinny, any more than you can say that the Eiffel Tower is or is not lonely. Margo's beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection-uncracked and uncrackable.

I hit at the dirt with my heels of my fists, and then pounded it again and again, the sand scattering around my hands until I was hitting the bare roots of the tree, and I kept it up, the pain shooting up through my palms and wrists. I had not cried for Margo until then, but now finally I did, pounding against the ground and shouting because there was no one to hear: I missed her I missed her I missed her I miss her.

I couldn’t figure out which of these ideas, if any, was at the core of the poem. But thinking about the grass and all the different ways you could se it made me think about all the ways I’d seen and mis-seen Margo. There was no shortage of ways to see her. I’d been focused on what had become of her, but now with my head trying to understand the multiplicity of grass and her smell from the blanket still in my throat, I realized that the most important question was who I was looking for. If “What is the grass?” has such a complicated answer, I thought, so, too, must “Who is Margo Roth Spiegelman?” Like a metaphor rendered incomprehensible by its ubiquity, there was room enough in what she had left me for endless imaginings, for an infinite set of Margos.

A message from Margo Roth Spiegelman: Your friendship with her—it sleeps with the fishes

Like a metaphor rendered incomprehensible by its ubiquity, there was room enough in what she had left me for endless imaginings, for an infinite set of Margos.

For so long, I hadn't really heard Margo - I'd seen her screaming and thought her laughing - that now I figured it was my job. To try, even at this great remove, to hear the opera of her.

Big, ugly homes for big, ugly people,' I told Margo as we pulled into Casavilla. 'No shit. If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms, do me a favor and shoot me.

Margo herself was—at least part of the time—very unMargo

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will. - Margo Yeah, that's true... But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all. - Q

Margo was not a miracle.She was not an adventure.She was not a fine and precious thing.She was just a girl.

Well, I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman my senior year of high school. At least I carpe'd that one diem.

Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was just a fine and precious thing.

But her shoulder was against my arm, and the backs of our hands were touching, and although I was not looking at Margo, pressing myself against the glass felt almost like pressing myself against her.

Margo menyukai misteri sejak dulu. Dan dalam semua hal yang terjadi setelahnya, aku tidak pernah bisa berhenti berpikir bahwa jangan-jangan lantaran terlampau menyukai misteri, dia pun menjadi misteri.

Jason Worthington gibi bir göt suratlı hem Margo hem de Becca'yla sevişebilirken, benim gibi kesinlikle hoş insanların ikisiyle -ya da herhangi başka biriyle -sevişememesi oldukça adaletsiz görünüyordu.

I stopped at a stop sign at the end of the street, and Margo said, "What the hell? Go go go go go," and I said, "Oh, right," because I had forgotten that I was throwing caution to the wind and everything.

Yes. 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.

We were walking away from the car together when Margo reached down for my hand,laced her fingers in mine,and squeezed.I squeezed back and then glanced at her.She nodded her head solemnly,and I nodded back,and then she let go of my hand.

You're going to be a very successful lawyer-or-something and get married and have babies and live your whole little life, and then you're going to die, and in your last moments, when you're choking on your own bile in the nursing home, you'll say to yourself: 'Well I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman in my senior year of high school. At least I carpe'd the one diem

Like me. Margo Roth Spiegelman was a person, too. And I had never quite thought of her that way, not really; it was a failure of all my previous imaginings. All along—not only since she left, but for a decade before—I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who—because no one thought she was a person—had no one to really talk to.

Hey, I notice you look like you're coming down off a meth binge and smell vaguely of algae. Were you perchance dancing with a snakebit Margo Roth Spiegelman a couple of hours ago?

Margo's beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection.

I’m so pissed at her. For . . . for, I don’t know. Not being the Margo I had expected her to be.

A la Margo sempre li han agradat els misteris. [...] Potser li agradaven tant els misteris que es va convertir en un misteri.

La Margo mateix era —si més no una part del temps— una persona que no feia per a la Margo.

Però aquí la tinc, […] i té l'aspecte de la Margo Roth Spiegelman […]; la noia que era una idea que jo estimava.

my heart is really pounding," I said. "That's how you know you're having fun," Margo said.

O para sempre é composto de agoras - diz Margo.

But thinking about the grass and all the different ways you can see it made me think about all the ways I'd seen and misseen Margo.

—No t'amoïna… per exemple, el sempre? —El sempre es compon de molts ares —contesta. No hi tinc res a dir; encara ho estic paint quan la Margo diu:— Emily Dickinson.

La belleza de Margo era una especie de recipiente de perfección cerrado, intacto e irrompible.

Pages later- hearing and exposed- Whitman starts to write about all the travel he can do by imagining, and lists all the places he can visit while loafing on the grass. "My palms cover continents," he writes. I kept thinking about maps, like the way sometimes when I was kid and I would look at atlases, and just the looking was kind of like being somewhere else. This is what I had to do.I had to hear and imagine my way into her map. But hadn't I been trying to do that? I looked up at the maps above my computer. I had tried to plot her possible travels, but just as the grass stood for too much so Margo stood for too much. It seemed impossible to pin her down with maps. She was too small and the space covered by the maps too big. They were more than a waste of time- they were the physical representation of the total fruitlessness of all of it, my absolute inability to develop the kinds of palms that cover continents, to have the kind of mind that correctly imagines.

El asunto con Margo Roth Spegelman es que realmente todo lo que podía hacer era dejarla hablar, y entonces cuando se detenía, hablarle valientemente para que siguiera, debido a los hechos que: 1. Estaba Eindiscutiblemente enamorado de ella 2. Era absolutamente sin precedentes en todas las formas, y 3. Realmente nunca me hacía preguntas, así que la única forma de evitar el silencio era mantenerla hablando.

L'error colossal que sempre havia comès —i que ella, per dir-ho tot, sempre m'havia deixat cometre— era aquest: la Margo no era un miracle. No era una aventura. No era una cosa bonia i valuosa. Era una noia.

I was standing above Chuck with his right eyebrow on my T-shirt when his eyes shot open. Lightning fast, Margo grabbed his comforter and threw it over him, and when I looked up, the little ninja was already out the window. I followed as quickly as I could, as Chuck screamed, “MAMA! DAD! ROBBERY ROBBERY!” I wanted to say, The only thing we stole was your eyebrow, but I kept mum as I swung myself feetfirst out the window.

A la Margo sempre li han agradat els misteris. I arran de tot el que va passar després, no em vaig poder treure mai del cap aquest pensament: potser li agradaven tant els misteris que es va convertir en un misteri.

I lay down and started to feel a little depressed about prom. I refused to feel any kind of sadness over the fact that I wasn't going to prom, but I had - stupidly, embarrassingly - thought of finding Margo, and getting her to come home with me just in time for prom, like late on Saturday night, and we'd walk into the Hilton ballroom wearing jeans and ratty T-shirts, and we'd be just in time for the last dance, and we'd dance while everyone pointed at us and marveled at the return of Margo, and then we'd fox-trot the hell out of there and go get ice cream at Friendly's. So yes, like Ben, I harbored ridiculous prom fantasies. But at least I didn't say mine out loud.

I knew how she smelled, and I knew how she acted in front of me, and I knew how she acted in front of others, and I knew that she liked Mountain Dew and adventure and dramatic gestures, and I knew that she was funny and smart and just generally more than the rest of us. But I didn’t know what brought her here, or what kept her here, or what made her leave. I didn’t know why she owned thousands of records but never told anyone she even liked music. I didn’t know what she did at night, with the shades down, with the door locked, in the sealed privacy of her room. And maybe this was what I needed to do above all. I needed to discover what Margo was like when she wasn’t being Margo.

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all likely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stopped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman

Und inzwischen besteht das ganze Leben nur aus Zukunft. Jeden Augenblick deines Lebens lebst du für die Zukunft - du machst deinen Schulabschluss, damit du aufs College gehen kannst, damit du einen guten Job kriegst, damit du dir ein schickes Haus kaufen kannst, damit du deinen Kindern die Ausbildung finanzieren kannst, damit sie eine guten Job kriegen, damit sie sich ein schickes Haus kaufen können, damit sie ihren Kindern eine gute Ausbildung finanzieren können.

Here is Margo Roth Spiegelman, five feet away from me, her lips chapped to cracking, makeup-less, dirt in her fingernails, her eyes silent. I’ve never seen her eyes dead like that, but then again, maybe I’ve never seen her eyes before.

La Margo sap el secret de marxar […]: marxar proporciona una sensació bona i pura només quan deixes alguna cosa important, alguna cosa que valores. Quan arrenques la vida de socarel. Però no ho pots fer fins que la teva vida no arreli.

New York or California? Chicago or D.C.? I could go now, too, I thought. I had a car just as much as she did. I could go to the five spots on the map, and even if I didn't find her, it would be more fun than another boiling summer in Orlando. But no. It's like breaking into SeaWorld. It takes an immaculate plan, and then you execute it brilliantly, and then—­nothing. And then it's just SeaWorld, except darker. She'd told me: the pleasure isn't in doing the thing; the pleasure is in planning it. And that's what I thought about as I stood beneath the showerhead: the planning. She sits in the minimall with her notebook, planning. Maybe she's planning a road trip, using the map to imagine routes. She reads the Whitman and highlights "I tramp a perpetual journey," because that's the kind of thing she likes to imagine herself doing, the kind of thing she likes to plan. But is it the kind of thing she likes to actually do? No. Because Margo knows the secret of leaving, the secret I have only just now learned: leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.

Because Margo knows the secret of leaving, the secret I have only just now learned: leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can’t do that until your life has grown roots. And so when she left, she left for good. But I could not believe she had left for a perpetual journey. She had, I felt sure, left for a place—a place where she could stay long enough for it to matter, long enough for the next leaving to feel as good as the last one had. There is a corner of the world somewhere far away from here where no one knows what “Margo Roth Spiegelman” means. And Margo is sitting in that corner, scrawling in her black notebook.

It must have been like this for Margo, too. With all the planning she'd done, she must have known she was leaving, and even she couldn't have been totally immune to the feeling. She'd had good days here. And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not.

Ben turned around and offered me his fist. I punched it softly, even though I hated that greeting. “Q!” he shouted over the music. “How good does this feel?” And I knew exactly what Ben meant: he meant listening to the Mountain Goats with your friends in a car that runs on a Wednesday morning in May on the way to Margo and whatever Margotastic prize came with finding her. “It beats calculus,

Observo com escriu. Tot i estar una mica bruta, té el mateix aspecte de sempre. No sé per què, però havia pensat que es veuria diferent. Més gran. Que amb prou feines la reconeixeria quan finalment la tornés a veure. Però aquí la tinc, i l'estic observant a través del metacrilat, i té l'aspecte de la Margo Roth Spiegelman, la noia que conec des que tenia dos anys; la noia que era una idea que jo estimava.

And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I'd done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me. These whitewashed cinderblock walls. My white walls. Margo's white walls. We'd been captive in them for so long, stuck in their belly like Jonah.

—Les coses no passen mai com te les has imaginat —sentencia. El cel és com un quadre contemporani monocromàtic, que m'arrossega cap al seu interior amb el miratge de la profunditat, estirant-me amunt. —Sí, és veritat —responc. I llavors, després de pensar-hi un segon, afegeixo:— Però és clar, si no imagines, no passarà res. Imaginar no és perfecte. No et pots ficar a dins de tot, al fons d'algú altre. Mai no m'hauria pogut imaginar la ràbia que ha mostrat la Margo quan l'hem trobat, o la història al damunt de la qual escrivia. Però imaginar-se ser algú altre, o que el món és diferent, és l'única manera d'entrar-hi.

These are the things I cannot imagine, and I realize that I cannot imagine them because I didn't know Margo. I knew how she smelled, and I knew how she acted in front of me, and I knew how she acted in front of others, and I knew that she liked Mountain Dew and adventures and dramatic gestures, and I knew that she was funny and smart and just generally more than the rest of us. But I didn't know what brought her here, or what kept her here, or what made her leave. I didn't know why she owned thousands of records but never told anyone she even liked music. I didn't know what she did at night, with the shades down, with the door locked, in the sealed privacy of her room.