Paper Towns

“Margo was so beautiful that even her fake smiles were convincing” 

Quentin’s comment points to the fact that so many people are willing to believe in a lie if it makes them feel better. As is revealed later in the novel, Quentin has idolized Margo since childhood. He does not see her for who she is, but for who he wants her to be. He is willing to revel in a false perception of her. 

“It’s a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters” 

“I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back … And that’s like a promise. At least for tonight” 

Margo tells Quentin that she did not need him to exact her revenge, she chose him as her companion. The fact that Quentin picked her back means that they have connected on some level, and that they owe allegiance to each other, at least for the night. This is a unique way of viewing connection.

“And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn’t in planning or doing or leaving: the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together” 

Early on, Margo suggests that Robert Joyner, who committed suicide when they were younger, must have done so because his strings had all snapped. He had no connection to anything. In this quote, then, Quentin is expressing the happiness he feels as a result of connecting with Margo, rather than any specific activity they are engaged in. 

“These kids, they’re like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float away” 

This is how Detective Otis Warren describes Margo. As a detective, he deals with countless kids who, for one reason or another, drift away from home. For them, strings feel like restraints that they want to be free of, rather than a beneficial link to people or places. Margo’s early adventures are instances of straining against the string that foreshadow her final disappearance.

“Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible … This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead” 

“I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself for, to train my body for the real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared” 

This quote points to the absurdity, as Margo pointed out earlier in the novel, of living for the future. 

“You will go to the paper towns and you will never come back” 

Margo wrote this on a wall in the strip mall and Quentin spends much of the novel trying to figure out what it means. For Margo, it meant that, as a “paper girl,” she needed to go to the paper town of Agloe in the hope that, there, she might discover how to be real.

“Let me give you some advice: let her come home. I mean, at some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too” 

Detective Warren tells Quentin that if he continues with his obsessive search for Margo, he will cut the strings that bind him to reality and float, just like she did. If she wants to come home, she will. 

“You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves” 

“The longer I do my job … the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel” 

Quentin’s father finds that many of the problems his patients face are the result of having poor role models for connecting to others and understanding one another. No one really knows how to express their true selves, so people are left with reflections and distorted perceptions of each other. 

“The fundamental mistake I had always made—and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make—was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl” 

Quentin finally sees that he has placed Margo on a pedestal, when in reality she is much more—and much less—than a mystery; he realizes that she is just a girl, that she is human, flawed and vulnerable.

“The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me” 

Quentin takes issue with Margo’s assessment of their lives as being flimsy and unimportant because they live in a “paper town.” Even if the town was fake, the memories they have created and shared there are not. Ultimately, people connect through these memories and life events.

“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world” 

Quentin discovers the appeal of leaving. He has always been afraid to leave and uproot his life, but as he throws all of his school belongings in a trashcan and walks away, he sees the possibilities created by leaving a place. 

“Margo knows the secret of leaving, the secret I have only just now learned: leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can’t do that until your life has grown roots” 

Quentin also realizes that leaving means leaving something real behind, something with substance. Pulling something up by its roots implies a history, and a history implies a lived life.

“And I can’t help but feel that Whitman, for all his blustering beauty, might have been just a bit too optimistic. We can hear others, and we can travel to them without moving, and we can imagine them, and we are all connected one to the other by a crazy root system like so many leaves of grass—but the game makes me wonder whether we can really ever fully become another” 

Quentin begins to perceive that truly knowing another person is a lot harder than it seems. He thinks that Whitman was too optimistic in this regard. Though he agrees that people have a common root system, based on his experience of searching for Margo, he is not sure if anyone can ever truly “become” another person, as Whitman suggests in his poem.

“Just—Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are. Like, I always thought Lacey was so hot and so awesome and so cool, but now when it actually comes to being with her … it’s not the exact same. People are different when you can smell them and see them up close, you know?” 

Here, Ben is trying to prepare Quentin for what will happen if they find Margo. He wants Quentin to understand that there is a huge difference between our perception of a person and who they really are.

“And it is only now, when she closes her notebook and places it inside a backpack next to her and then stands up and walks toward us, that I realize that the idea is not only wrong but dangerous. What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person” 

Quentin is shocked to finally find Margo, and a bit disappointed by how calm she is on his arrival. He has spent so much time desperately searching for her that he expected a more dramatic reunion. In this moment, he realizes how dangerous it is to idolize a human being, which is also to dehumanize them.

“People love the idea of a paper girl. They always have. And the worst thing is that I loved it, too. I cultivated it, you know … 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” 

Margo admits that for all her complaints about people being paper-thin, she was too. She was a “paper girl” who encouraged people’s perception of her as such. Being a “paper girl” meant that she could hide behind a persona that she preferred to her true self. The problem was that, ultimately, she could not live with the false self, so she pulled up her roots and left.

“She can see it in my face—I understand now that I can’t be her and she can’t be me. Maybe Whitman had a gift I don’t have. But as for me: I must ask the wounded man where he is hurt, because I cannot become the wounded man. The only wounded man I can be is me” 

Quentin realizes that he cannot become Margo any more than she can become him; they can only be who they are. 

“Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo’s anger at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists” 

Quentin realizes that people still have to imagine and believe. Perceptions, reflections and representation are, in this sense, still necessary, and at times, even revolutionary. They are viable methods of connection and communication.

“Maybe it’s more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like, each of us starts as a watertight vessel. And then things happen … and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places … But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open and when we finally fall apart. And it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out” 

Quentin creates a metaphor of connection that seems to work better than Margo’s strings or Whitman’s grass. Human beings are cracked vessels, and they see one another through their cracks. In other words, they can understand pain and loss based on their own understanding and experience of pain and loss.