TurtlesAllTheWayDownQuotes

“My brain was quiet now that I’d done the thing it wanted me to do”

“Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself”

“I don’t control my thoughts, so they’re not really mine. I don’t decide if I’m sweating or get cancer or C. diff or whatever, so my body isn’t really mine. I don’t decide any of that – outside forces do. I’m a story they’re telling. I am circumstances”

“I want the past back, no matter the cost. It doesn’t matter that it won’t come back, that it never even actually existed as I remember it—I want it back. I want things to be like they were, or like I remember them having been: Whole”

“I apologize for the double negative, but it’s a real double negative of a situation, a bind from witch negating the negation is truly the only escape”

“I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name. The way he talked about thoughts was the way I experienced them-not as a choice but as a destiny. Not a catalogue of my consciousness, but a reflection of it”

“God, a lot happened since you lost your mind. Is that rude to say?“ “Actually, the problem is that I can’t lose my mind,” I said. “It’s inescapable.””

“I thought, It’s happening, the it too terrifying and vast to name with anything but a pronoun”

“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 person if she has a boyfriend or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?”

“Who knows what lies I believe, or you do. Who knows what we shouldn’t doubt”

“I wasn’t tired, exactly, but I wasn’t too keen on consciousness, either”

“When I was little, I knew that monsters weren’t, like, real. But I also knew that I could be hurt by things that weren’t real. I knew that made-up things mattered, and could kill you”

“I’m sorry it’s not fun hanging out with me because I’m stuck inside my head so much, but imagine being actually stuck inside my head with no way out, with no way to ever take a break from it, because that’s my life”

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

“And we’re such language based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so assume it isn’t real”

““Wealth is careless-so around it, you must be careful.” “He’s not wealth. He’s a person.””

“I disgusted myself. I was revolting, but I couldn’t recoil from my self because I was stuck inside of it”