Turtles All the Way Down

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER



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



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



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



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



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



And if you can't pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren't really real, you know? Maybe I'm just a lie that I'm whispering to myself.



“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on.” —ROBERT FROST



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



I don't understand why he's so stuck inside himself, when there is this endlessness to fall into.



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?



In the best conversations, you don't even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It was like we weren't even there, lying together by the pool. 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.



You're a we. You're a you. You're a she, an it, a they. My kingdom for an I.



You are like pizza, which is the highest compliment I can pay a person.



I'm doing my best, but I can't stay sane for you, okay?



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.



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.



The problem with happy endings,” I said, “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.