Paper Towns

There is a section in the book Paper Towns (John Green) that I really identified with and liked.
Quotations are in quote marks. ... symbolizes breaks between passages that weren't as important.

I have never really thought of him as a person, either. A guy who played in the dirt like me. A guy who fell in love like me. A guy whose strings were broken, who didn't feel the root of his leaf of grass connected the the field, a guy who was cracked. Like me.
...
"I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is."
...
"When I've thought about him dying, which admittedly isn't all that much I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe strings break, or maybe or ships sink, or maybe we're grass, our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, i what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications."
...
"I like the strings. I always have. Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is, I think. We're not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me to imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well, but never quite perfectly.
Maybe it's more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. LIke, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen, these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up 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 our window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out."