Paper Towns

Listen, kid. This is what happens...These kids are like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and stain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float away. And maybe you never see the balloon again...Or maybe three or four years from now, or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home, because it needs money, or it sobered up, or it misses its kid brother. But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time.

The thing about these balloons is that there are so goddamned many of them. The sky is choked full of them, rubbing up against one another as they float to here or from there...Everywhere the balloons, and each of them with a mother or a father, or God forbid both, and after a while you can't even see them individually. You look up at all the balloons in the sky and you can see all of the balloons, but you cannot see any one balloon. But then every now and again you talk to some big-eyed kid with too much hair for his head and you want to lie to him because he seems like a good kid. And you feel bad for this kid, because the only thing worse than the sky full of balloons you see is what he sees: a clear blue day interrupted by just the one balloon. But once that string gets cut, kid, you cab't uncut it...

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.