Turtles All The Way Down by John Green
I haven't read a book I loved this much in a long time. It's another one of those books that you rip through because you can't put it down but you immediately want to read it again, slower, once you finish it. This really makes you go down into your feelings. John Green has a way of being really current and topical but makes it really genuine.
I felt like I was Aza at times, feeling uncomfortable in my own skin and holding my breath as she fights with herself. I saw myself as her and as her best friend, Daisy. It opened me up to the way I perceive things and how others might perceive something different. That's what's so great about books.
This book has a good dose of love in it, but not in the way you are probably thinking. Aza's relationship with Davis is unique and strange and I enjoyed everything about it.
A lot of people give people a hard time for really Young Adult books, but they are such an important part of a well-balanced reading curriculum. I can see this book being taught in school. I think it should be taught in schools as an important conversation of mental health.
You can get this book for $12.59 for a signed, hardcover copy! You have to pick this up, even if you aren't a fan of John Green.
Favorite Quotes:
"I wondered why I wanted him to kiss me, and how to know why you want to be with someone, how to disentangle the messy knots of wanting."
"Everyone always celebrates the easy attractiveness of green or blue eyes, but there was a depth to Davis's brown eyes that you just don't get from lighter colors, and the way he looked at me made me feel like there was something worthwhile in the brown of my eyes, too."
"I thought about him asking me if I'd ever been in love. 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."
"'I like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that's what life is like.' 'That's what life is like?' I was trying to get his meaning. 'Yeah. It rhymes, but not in the way you expect.'"
"I could feel the tension in the air, and I knew he was trying to figure out how to make me happy again. His brain was spinning right alongside mine. I couldn't make myself happy, but I could make people around me miserable."
"'I like us. I like that we've got our own way of doing things.'"
"There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way - one for every person who ever lived, more or less."
"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."
"We always say that 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 thats - but English puts us beneath the stars, at least."
"Our hearts were broken in the same places. That's something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself."
"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."
"I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me."
"I was thinking about Davis's journal, of that Frost quote, 'In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life - it goes on.' And you go on, too, when the current is with you and when it isn't."
"We settled into a silence, and I felt the sky's bigness above me, the unimaginable vastness of it all - looking at Polaris and realizing the light I was seeing was 425 years old, and then looking at Jupiter, less than a light-hour from us."
"And I knew I would remember that feeling, underneath the split-up sky, back before the machinery of fate ground us into one thing or another, back when we could still be everything."
"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."
"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."
"I, a singular proper noun, would go on, if always in a conditional tense."
"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 every says good-bye unless they want to see you again."