Paper Town Quotes & Sayings

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 those paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenient store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the thing paper-thin and paper-frail. — John Green

Cincinnati at that time was also beginning to realize it had major cartooning talent in Jim Borgman, at the city's other paper, and I didn't benefit from the comparison.His footsteps seemed like good ones to follow, so I cultivated an interest in politics, and Borgman helped me a lot in learning how to construct an editorial cartoon. Neither of us dreamed I'd end up in the same town on the opposite paper. — Bill Watterson

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. — John Green

She launched the airplane and it caught a current and circled down toward the town, like a promise of something good. — A.S. King

What's your point?" He spun around in his chair and took a brown file folder from a wire rack on the credenza behind him next to a couple of generic office plants. He opened it, took out a sheet of paper, and looked at it for a moment. Then he handed it to me. It was a fax from a bank in the Caymans called Transatlantic Bank & Trust (Cayman) Limited, located on Mary Street in George Town, Grand Cayman. A copy of a copy of a copy, festooned with smudges and photocopier artifacts. It was a letter from Roger, on Gifford Industries letterhead, to the bank's manager. A letter of instruction. — Joseph Finder

As the world stood on the brink of war in August 1914, the local paper of a small town in the west of Ireland took a stand: 'We give this solemn warning to Kaiser Wilhelm: The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on you. — Robert Hutton

You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. — John Green

If my mom sees you here, she'll ---"
"Paper the walls with my innards while the innocents watch? — Jamie Farrell

With all the planning she'd done, she must have known she was leaving, and even she couldn't have been totally immune to the feeling. She'd had good days here. And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she made a life here, just as I had. 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. These whitewashed cinder-block walls. My white walls. Margo's white walls. We'd been captive in them for so long, stuck in their belly like Jonah. — John Green

Former police chief of Houston once said of me: "Frank Abagnale could write a check on toilet paper, drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it 'U.R. Hooked' and cash it at any bank in town, using a Hong Kong driver's license for identification. — Frank W. Abagnale

The town was paper, but the memories were not. — John Green

He had been living in a down-town Y.M.C.A., but when he quit the task of making sow-ear purses out of sows' ears, he moved up-town and went to work immediately as a reporter for The Sun. He kept at this for a year, doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one day an infelicitous incident peremptorily closed his newspaper career. On a February afternoon he was assigned to report a parade of Squadron A. Snow threatening, he went to sleep instead before a hot fire, and when he woke up did a smooth column about the muffled beats of the horses' hoofs in the snow ... This he handed in. Next morning a marked copy of the paper was sent down to the City Editor with a scrawled note: "Fire the man who wrote this." It seemed that Squadron A had also seen the snow threatening - had postponed the parade until another day. A week later he had begun "The Demon Lover." ... In — F Scott Fitzgerald

The town was paper, but the memory was not. — John Green

She had seen Brianna's face for a moment in the light; white as paper and hard as bone, with the eyes black holes. Her gentle, kindly mistress had vanished like smoke, taken over by a deamhan, a she-devil. Lizzie was a town lass, born long after Culloden. She had never seen the wild clansmen of the glens, or a Highlander in the grip of blood fury - but she'd heard the auld stories, and now she knew them true. A person who looked like that might do anything at all. She — Diana Gabaldon

She kind of hates Orlando; she called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy. I think she just wanted a vacation from that. — John Green

A paper town for a paper girl," she says. — John Green

Murder in a small town is always more than a paragraph in the local paper. In a place so insulated, where lives are so small and gone about so quietly, violent death hangs in the air - tinting everything crimson, weaving itself into the shimmering heat that rises off the winding asphalt roads at noon. It oozes from taps and runs through the gas pumps. It sits at the dinner table, murmuring in urgent low tones under the clinking of glassware. — Kat Rosenfield

A paper town for a paper girl. — John Green

If it weren't for supplies, I'd never go back down to town. But a man has to do what a man has to do. Hard to live like a king without toilet paper.
Astamur — Ilona Andrews

Barack Obama, you know has a lot of supporters here in America, but he's very popular internationally. It's quite interesting. This is a true story. It was in the paper. Barack Obama is so popular in the African town where his father was born, they've named a beer after him. That's true. Yeah. So next time you're in Africa, sit back, relax, and enjoy a tall, cold Barackelob Light. Good enough. Clearly not as popular a beer as it used to be. — Conan O'Brien

It took me over a couple of months to find the right piece of transparent paper for a section near the centre, on the right side of the Garden of Nebuchadnezzar. When I did find it, it was on a bottle of my wife's toilet water. — Harold Town

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even get rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city. — Raymond Chandler

When the windows like the jackal's eye and desire pierce the dawn, silken windlasses lift me up to suburban footbridges. I summon a girl who is dreaming in the little gilded house; she meets me on the piles of black moss and offers me her lips which are stones in the rapid river depths. Veiled forebodings descend the buildings' steps. The best thing is to flee from the great feather cylinders when the hunters limp into the sodden lands. If you take a bath in the watery patterns of the streets, childhood returns to the country like a greyhound. Man seeks his prey in the breezes and the fruits are drying on the screens of pink paper, in the shadow of the names overgrown by forgetfulness. Joys and sorrows spread in the town. Gold and eucalyptus, similarly scented, attack dreams. Among the bridles and the dark edelweiss subterranean forms are resting like perfumers' corks. — Andre Breton

And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. 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. — John Green

It's a paper town. — John Green

He looked up from the paper he was scribbling on and offered
her a lopsided grin. "Hey, sweet pea. You bring me anything
special?"
The lopsided bit wasn't odd, but there was something forced
about it. "Got a fresh bag of cat food outside." Cat food that she'd
bought with the twenty he'd left to pay for his ice cream.
He pushed his makeshift drum set aside and rose with a
stretch. "Words every man dreams of hearing. Make my night if
you say you got catnip too."
She tried not to giggle. She tried hard.
But she couldn't help herself. "Extra strength," she said.
This time, his grin came out bigger, less forced. "Woman of
my dreams."
"In your dreams," she said. — Jamie Farrell

One of the important things about being a small-town reporter is knowing what not to put in the paper. — Terry Pratchett

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. — T.C. Boyle

To get the idea that you are the center," Oliveira thought, resting more comfortably on the board. "But it's incalculably stupid. A center as illusory as it would be to try to find ubiquity. There is no center, there's a kind of continuous confluence, an undulation of matter. All through the night I'm a motionless body, and on the other side of town a roll of newsprint is being converted into the morning paper, and at eight-forty I will leave the house and at eight-twenty the paper will have arrived at the newsstand on the corner, and at eight forty-five my hand and the newspaper will come together and begin to move together through the air, three feet from the ground, heading towards the streetcar stop. — Julio Cortazar

A Paper Town is a town that's got a paper mill on it. — John Green

About time," Brianna said.
"Hey, sorry, we were kind of busy," Quinn snapped. "And I didn't exactly realize I was on a schedule."
"I don't like what I have to do here," Brianna said. She handed Quinn the note.
He read it. Read it again.
"Is this some kind of joke?" he demanded.
"Albert's dead," Brianna said. "Murdered."
"What?"
"He's dead. Sam and Dekka are off in the wilderness somewhere. Edilio's got the flu, he might die, a lot of kids have. A lot. And there are these, these monsters, these kind of bugs . . . no one knows what to call them . . . heading toward town." Her face contorted in a mix of rage and sorrow and fear. She blurted, "And I can't stop them!"
Quinn stared at her. Then back at the note.
He felt his contented little universe tilt and go sliding away.
There were just two words on the paper: "Get Caine. — Michael Grant

She called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy. — John Green

She loves mysteries that she became one. — John Green

WORK, SOMETIMES
I was sad all day, and why not. There I was, books piled
on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words
falling off my tongue.
The robins had been a long time singing, and now it
was beginning to rain.
What are we sure of? Happiness isn't a town on a map,
or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing. Which is not likely to be the trifling around
with a poem.
Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.
You have had days like this, no doubt. And wasn't it
wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a
moment!
As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was
the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life. — Mary Oliver

Looks like Madison Estates isn't going to get built; my husband and I bought property there, but someone called this week to say they're refunding us our deposit because they didn't presell enough houses to finance the project. Another paper town for KS!- Marge in Cawker, KS — John Green

EVERY FEW WEEKS AND SOMETIMES MORE OFTEN THAN THAT, the Benzes would receive in the postbox affixed to the wall outside their front door a notice printed on a half-size sheet of white paper, bordered in a bold black line. They were death announcements. Ein Bestattungsanzeige. The postman delivered them along with the mail whenever a Dietlikon resident died. It was a small-town courtesy, not a typical Swiss practice. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, 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. — John Green

Martyrs of a sort they were, these children, along with the town drunk, in his basketball sneakers and buttonless overcoat, draining blackberry brandy from a paper bag as he sat on his bench in Kazmierczak Square, risking nightly death by exposure; martyrs too of a sort were the men and women hastening to adulterous trysts, risking disgrace and divorce for their fix of motel love - all sacrificing the outer world to the inner, proclaiming with this priority that everything solid-seeming and substantial is in fact a dream, of less account than a merciful rush of feeling. — John Updike

He smiled. "I bet the paper ran something about you once your hiring was confirmed. A new cop is big news in a small town. People were probably admonished to make you feel at home."
She shook her head with some amusement. "I would have felt more at home if they shot at me,. — Dana Marton

This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind. — Hilary Mantel

Its a paper town, with paper houses and paper people, everything is uglier up close. — John Green

The occult town was vibrant, busy with fiddles playing themselves on street corners, and enchanted paper lanterns hanging mysteriously string-less in the dead of night. Lycanthropes chattered with each other in alleyways between the hotels and inns. Fairies stalked in the shadows, preying on unfortunate cats and mice. Hearty Elves with round bellies and rosy smiles worked late into the night, pushing their wooden carts filled with baked goods and meats. — Shayne Leighton

A little instruction in the elements of chartography - a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map - would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost. — Mary Antin

I never did like the idea of sitting on newspapers. I did it once, and all the headlines came off on my white pants. On the level! It actually happened. Nobody bought a paper that day. They just followed me around over town and read the news on the seat of my pants. — Clark Gable

The Echo was a rag specializing in yard sales, area sports, and town politics. The residents scanned those things, he supposed, but mostly bought the paper for the obituaries and Police Beat. Everybody liked to know which of their neighbors had died or been jailed. — Stephen King

I admitted it to myself.
I had all kinds of dreams. I wanted to go skiing again and get fast and good. I wanted to go to London too someday. I wanted to fall in love.i wanted to own a bookstore or a restraunt and have people come in and say, "Hi, Cedar," and I wanted from ride a bike down the streets in a little town in a country where people spoke a different language. Maybe my bike would a basket and maybe the basket would have flowers in it. I wanted to live in a big city and wear lipstick and my hair in bun and buy groceries and carry them home in a paper bag. My high heels would click when I climbed the stairs to my apartment. I wanted to stand at the edge of a lake and listen. — Ally Condie

Every day, streets papered with more and more for .
Reward, reward, reward.
Reward for information.
If you see something, say something.
A paper town, a paper world: paper rustling in the airm whispering to me, hissing out a message of posion and jealousy.
If you know something, do something.
I'm sorry, Lena. — Lauren Oliver