Turtle Quotes

We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.

I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.

Your now is not your forever.

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.

And the turtles, of course...all the turtles are free, as turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.

I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here at the bottom we, too, should have rights.

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

Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.

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.

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.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.

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

You want to talk? Fine. Talk. Tell me something you've never told anybody else.' I thought for a moment. 'Turtles have the second-largest brains of any animal on the planet.' It took Isabel only a second to process this. 'No, they don't.' 'I know that's why I've never told anybody that before.

I’m stuck babysitting turtle eggs while a volleyball player slash grease monkey slash aquarium volunteer tries to hit on me.” I’m not hitting on you,” he protested. No?” Believe me, you’d know if I was hitting on you. You wouldn’t be able to stop yourself from succumbing to my charms.

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.

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.

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.

Well, I never heard it before, but it sounds uncommon nonsense.

I is the hardest word to define.

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.

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.

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