Turtle All The Way Down Quotes

Your now is not your forever.

no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again. aa

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.

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

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.

The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.

The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.

Actually, the problem is that I can’t lose my mind,” I said. “It’s inescapable.

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.

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.

There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn't.

I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.

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

To be alive is to be missing.

You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.

I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.

I is the hardest word to define.

No, it's not, Holmesy. 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.

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.

Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.

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

Our hearts were broken in the same places. That's something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.

Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.

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

If only I were as good at life as I am at the internet.

Whether it hurts is kind of irrelevant.

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.

Break hearts, not promises.

I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me.

People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember.

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.

Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We're all stuck inside ourselves.

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.

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.

Life is a series of choices between wonders.

Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.

She noted, more than once, that the meteor shower was happening, beyond the overcast sky, even if we could not see it. Who cares if she can kiss? She can see through the clouds.

And I kept thinking about how sky is a singular noun, as if it's one thing. But the sky isn't one thing. The sky is everything. And last night, it was enough.

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.

I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.

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 ostracise and minimise. 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.

It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it. Because you can’t be sure, you know?

Maybe you are what you can't not be.

You feeling scared?" "Kinda." "Of what?" "It's not like that. The sentence doesn't have, like, an object. I'm just scared.

Photographs are just light and time,

I couldn't make myself happy, but I could make people around me miserable.

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.

And 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.

Every loss is unprecedented.

Thoughts are only thoughts.They are not you, you belong to yourself even when your thoughts don't.

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.

It's not how you die. It's who you die.

I get that nothing lasts. But why do I have to miss everybody so much?

I guess at some point, you realize that whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can't actually protect you from getting hurt.

We are about to live the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else’s misfortune.

I thought, lying there, that I might love him for the rest of my life. We did love each other—maybe we never said it, and maybe love was never something we were in, but it was something I felt. I loved him, and I thought, maybe I will never see him again, and I'll be stuck missing him, and isn't that so terrible.

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 on high at 12:37. But really, the bell decides. You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas.

You think you're the painter, but you're the canvas

You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.

Being vulnerable is asking to get used.

I don't mind worriers," I said. "Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.

Reading someone's poetry is like seeing them naked" -Davis Pritchett

My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really - which meant I guess that he was still living, too.

I don’t like to throw the L-word around; it’s too good and rare a feeling to cheapen with overuse.

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.

You just, like, hate yourself? You hate being yourself?" "There's no self to hate. It's like, when I look into myself, there's no actual me—just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. And a lot of them just don't feel like they're mine. They're not things I want to think or do or whatever. And when I do look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It's like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there's a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it's solid all the way through. But with me, I don't think there is one that is solid. They just keep getting smaller.

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. I have no interest in dating.

The madness of wealth,” my mother mumbled. “Sometimes you think you’re spending money, but all along the money’s spending you.

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.

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.

We squeeze his hand. He squeezes back. You stare up at the same sky together, and after a while he says, I have to go, and you say, Good-bye, and he says Good-bye, Aza, and no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.

Does it hurt?' I nodded. '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.

Dr. Karen Singh liked to say that a 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.

Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At teh end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever, " said the old lady. "But it turtles all the way down!

Love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift.

Sometimes I wondered why she liked me, or at least tolerated me. Why any of them did. Even I found myself annoying.

But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances? -Aza

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.

We are both astonishments, the closest thing in the known universe to a miracle

If I die weep at my grave every day until a seedling appears in the dirt, then cry on it to make it grow until it becomes a beautiful tree whose roots surround my body.

You can’t control it, that’s the thing,” I said. “Life is not something you wield, you know?

For some reason, I wanted to tell him the truth. “Whether it hurts is kind of irrelevant.” “That’s a pretty good life motto,” he said.

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

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." "Because it's turtles all the way down," I said again, feeling something akin to a spiritual revelation.

You don't know a father's weight until it's lifted.

I was a story riddled with plot holes.

The whole problem with boys is that ninety-nine percent of them are, like, okay. If you could dress and hygiene them properly, and make them stand up straight and listen to you and not be dumbasses, they'd be totally acceptable.

Who cares if she can kiss? She can see through the clouds.

I didn't know if I should hug him, and he didn't seem to know if he should hug me, so we just sort of stood there not touching, which to be honest is my preferred form of greeting.

Anyway. I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!” I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises.

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?

And I wanted to tell him that even though I'd never been in love, I knew what it was like to be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated by it, the way my grandmother talked about God being everywhere.

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 quote)

I would always be like this, always have this within me. There was no beating it. I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me. My self and the disease were knotted together for life.

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

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.

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down

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.

I'm really not looking to date anyone." I know people often say that when secretly looking for a romantic partner, but I mean it. I definitely felt attracted to some people, and I liked the idea of being with someone, but the actual mechanics of it didn't much suit my talents. Like, parts of typical romantic relationships that made me anxious included 1. Kissing; 2. Having to say the right things to avoid hurt feelings; 3. Saying more wrong things while trying to apologize; 4. Being at a movie theater together and feeling obligated to hold hands even after your hands become sweaty and the sweat starts mixing together; 5. The part where they say, "What are you thinking about?" And they want you to be, like, "I'm thinking about you, darling," but you're actually thinking about how cows literally could not survive if it weren't for the bacteria in their guts, and how that means that cows do not exist as independent life-forms, but that's not really something you can say out loud, so you're ultimately forced to choose between lying and seeming weird.