Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

You're not boring. You've got to stop saying that, or people will start believing you.

I said nothing—I hadn’t known Marya, and anyway, “listening quietly” was my general social strategy

It's not fair," I said. "It's just so goddamned unfair." "The world," he said, "is not a wishgranting factory.

Because it's kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place where a paper creation became real. A dot on the map became a real place, more real than the people who created the dot could never have imagined. I thought maybe the paper cutout of a girl could start becoming real here also. And it seemed like a way to tell that paper girl who cared about popularity and clothes and everything else: 'You are going to the paper towns. And you are never coming back.

Destiny is not something that happens all at once-it's something that happens only in retrospect.

But mothers lie. It's in the job description.