Turtles All the Way Down

by

John Green

Aza Holmes Character Analysis

Aza is the sixteen-year-old protagonist of the novel. She has struggled for most of her life with anxiety and OCD. She spends much of her time wondering if she's real or not and as a child, developed a compulsion to test if she's real: she presses her thumbnail into the pad of her middle finger, opening up a cut that she believes proves her reality. However, she also fears bacteria, particularly C. diff. She has to compulsively re-open her finger wound, clean it, and re-bandage it several times per day to keep it clean and free from bacteria. Aza's fear of bacteria sends her into what she terms "thought spirals," in which her fearful thoughts take over her mind and send her into a panic. At these times, she doesn't feel as though she's in control of her own thoughts. Aza resists taking her medication regularly, as she doesn’t like the feeling that something else is determining who she is and how she behaves. Beginning a romantic relationship with Davis sends Aza's thought spirals into overdrive—particularly when they kiss, as Aza can't stop thinking about Davis' bacteria entering her body. These factors, coupled with her discovery of her best friend Daisy's insufferable fanfiction character Ayala, precipitate Aza's mental breakdown. After Aza is hospitalized following a car crash, Mom catches her drinking hand sanitizer. The confrontation finally enables Aza to admit that she is not well and needs help. In the weeks following the crash, Aza takes a new medication regularly and becomes more comfortable with the fact that her illness is always going to be a part of her. She realizes she's never going to be completely well, and that she will have to struggle to come to terms with being an “integrated plurality” rather than a singular “I.” At the end of the novel, the reader learns that the novel is the product of Aza’s third mental breakdown later in life, and that a psychiatrist told her to write her story down. The act of writing teaches Aza that she will go on, and that she is deserving of love.

Aza Holmes Quotes in Turtles All the Way Down

The Turtles All the Way Down quotes below are all either spoken by Aza Holmes or refer to Aza Holmes. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Identity, Selfhood, and Mental Illness Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

... and meanwhile I was thinking that if half the cells inside of you are not you, doesn't that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone the author of my fate?

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Daisy, Mychal
Related Symbols: Bacteria (C. diff), Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

I've got a theory about uniforms. I think they design them so that you become, like, a nonperson, so that you're not Daisy Ramirez, a Human Being, but instead a thing that brings people pizza and exchanges their tickets for plastic dinosaurs. It's like the uniform is designed to hide me.

Related Characters: Daisy (speaker), Aza Holmes
Page Number: 20
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

I have these thoughts that Dr. Karen Singh calls "intrusives," but the first time she said it, I heard "invasives," which I like better, because, like invasive weeds, these thoughts seem to arrive at my biosphere from some faraway land, and then they spread out of control.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Dr. Singh
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

And he was obviously a person. Like, what even makes you a person? He had a body and a soul and feelings, and he spoke a language, and he was an adult, and if he and Rey were in hot, hairy, communicative love, then let's just thank God that two consenting, sentient adults found each other in a dark and broken galaxy.

Related Characters: Daisy (speaker), Aza Holmes
Related Symbols: The Sky, Stars, and Astronomy
Page Number: 66
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: it was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Dr. Singh
Page Number: 85
Explanation and Analysis:

You're right that self isn't simple, Aza. Maybe it's not even singular. Self is a plurality, but pluralities can also be integrated, right? Think of a rainbow. It's one arc of light, but also seven differently colored arcs of light.

Related Characters: Dr. Singh (speaker), Aza Holmes
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:

And we're such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn't real.

Related Characters: Dr. Singh (speaker), Aza Holmes
Page Number: 89
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

... now I was talking about parasite-infected bird feces, which was more or less the opposite of romance, but I couldn't stop myself, because I wanted him to understand that I felt like the fish, like my whole story was written by someone else.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Davis Pickett Jr.
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

I'd probably killed myself with sepsis because of some stupid childhood ritual that didn't even prove what I wanted it to prove, because what I wanted to know was unknowable, because there was no way to be sure about anything.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Daisy
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

"I know you think you're poor or whatever, but you know nothing about being actually poor."
"Okay, I'll shut up about it," I said.
"You're so stuck in your own head," she continued. "It's like you genuinely can't think about anyone else." I felt like I was getting smaller.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Daisy (speaker)
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:

He's, just... I guess at some point, you realize that whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can't actually protect you from getting hurt. Which is one thing. But Noah is starting to understand that maybe the person he thought was a superhero turns out sort of to be the villain.

Related Characters: Davis Pickett Jr. (speaker), Aza Holmes, Davis Pickett, Sr., Noah
Related Symbols: Iron Man
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis:

When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it. And I wanted to tell him that the idea of being in a feeling gave language to something I couldn't describe before, created a form for it, but I couldn't figure out how to say any of that out loud.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Davis Pickett Jr.
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:

His bacteria would be in me forever, eighty million of them, breeding and growing and joining my bacteria and producing God knows what.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Davis Pickett Jr.
Related Symbols: Bacteria (C. diff), Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 153
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

Him: When you're on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that. Nobody who's doing it ever talks about anything else.

Related Characters: Davis Pickett Jr. (speaker), Aza Holmes
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 162
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

As I looked at his face looking at mine, I realized the light that made him visible to me came mostly from a cycle: Our screens were lighting each of us with light from the other's bedroom. I could only see him because he could see me.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Davis Pickett Jr.
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 191
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Daisy, Ayala
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:

It's just, like, this isn't going to be some story where the poor, penniless girl gets rich and then realizes that truth matters more than money and establishes her heroism by going back to being the poor, penniless girl, okay?

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Daisy, Davis Pickett, Sr.
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

It was saying that my bacteria were affecting my thinking--maybe not directly, but through the information they told my gut to send to my brain. Maybe you're not even thinking this thought. Maybe your thinking's infected.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker)
Related Symbols: Bacteria (C. diff), Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 210
Explanation and Analysis:

Please just let me out. Whoever is authoring me, let me up out of this. Anything to be out of this.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker)
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 211
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

... the stupidity of Ayala, Aza, and Holmesy and all my irreconcilable selves, my self-absorption, the filth in my gut, think about anything other than yourself you disgusting narcissist.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Ayala
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 21 Quotes

My whole life I thought I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along.

Related Characters: Daisy (speaker), Aza Holmes
Page Number: 241
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

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 own.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Daisy, Mychal
Page Number: 257
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24 Quotes

I would always be like this, always have this within me. There was no beating it. I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me. My self and the disease were knotted together for life.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker)
Page Number: 280
Explanation and Analysis:

... I realized something Davis must have already known: Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Davis Pickett Jr.
Related Symbols: The Sky, Stars, and Astronomy
Page Number: 280
Explanation and Analysis:

I know that girl would go on, that she would grow up, have children and love them, that despite loving them she would get too sick to care for them, be hospitalized, get better, and then get sick again. I know a shrink would say, Write it down, how you got here.
So you would, and in writing it down you realize, love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker)
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 285
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Turtles All the Way Down LitChart as a printable PDF.
Turtles All the Way Down PDF

Aza Holmes Quotes in Turtles All the Way Down

The Turtles All the Way Down quotes below are all either spoken by Aza Holmes or refer to Aza Holmes. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Identity, Selfhood, and Mental Illness Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

... and meanwhile I was thinking that if half the cells inside of you are not you, doesn't that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone the author of my fate?

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Daisy, Mychal
Related Symbols: Bacteria (C. diff), Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

I've got a theory about uniforms. I think they design them so that you become, like, a nonperson, so that you're not Daisy Ramirez, a Human Being, but instead a thing that brings people pizza and exchanges their tickets for plastic dinosaurs. It's like the uniform is designed to hide me.

Related Characters: Daisy (speaker), Aza Holmes
Page Number: 20
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

I have these thoughts that Dr. Karen Singh calls "intrusives," but the first time she said it, I heard "invasives," which I like better, because, like invasive weeds, these thoughts seem to arrive at my biosphere from some faraway land, and then they spread out of control.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Dr. Singh
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

And he was obviously a person. Like, what even makes you a person? He had a body and a soul and feelings, and he spoke a language, and he was an adult, and if he and Rey were in hot, hairy, communicative love, then let's just thank God that two consenting, sentient adults found each other in a dark and broken galaxy.

Related Characters: Daisy (speaker), Aza Holmes
Related Symbols: The Sky, Stars, and Astronomy
Page Number: 66
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: it was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Dr. Singh
Page Number: 85
Explanation and Analysis:

You're right that self isn't simple, Aza. Maybe it's not even singular. Self is a plurality, but pluralities can also be integrated, right? Think of a rainbow. It's one arc of light, but also seven differently colored arcs of light.

Related Characters: Dr. Singh (speaker), Aza Holmes
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:

And we're such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn't real.

Related Characters: Dr. Singh (speaker), Aza Holmes
Page Number: 89
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

... now I was talking about parasite-infected bird feces, which was more or less the opposite of romance, but I couldn't stop myself, because I wanted him to understand that I felt like the fish, like my whole story was written by someone else.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Davis Pickett Jr.
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

I'd probably killed myself with sepsis because of some stupid childhood ritual that didn't even prove what I wanted it to prove, because what I wanted to know was unknowable, because there was no way to be sure about anything.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Daisy
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

"I know you think you're poor or whatever, but you know nothing about being actually poor."
"Okay, I'll shut up about it," I said.
"You're so stuck in your own head," she continued. "It's like you genuinely can't think about anyone else." I felt like I was getting smaller.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Daisy (speaker)
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:

He's, just... I guess at some point, you realize that whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can't actually protect you from getting hurt. Which is one thing. But Noah is starting to understand that maybe the person he thought was a superhero turns out sort of to be the villain.

Related Characters: Davis Pickett Jr. (speaker), Aza Holmes, Davis Pickett, Sr., Noah
Related Symbols: Iron Man
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis:

When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it. And I wanted to tell him that the idea of being in a feeling gave language to something I couldn't describe before, created a form for it, but I couldn't figure out how to say any of that out loud.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Davis Pickett Jr.
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:

His bacteria would be in me forever, eighty million of them, breeding and growing and joining my bacteria and producing God knows what.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Davis Pickett Jr.
Related Symbols: Bacteria (C. diff), Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 153
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

Him: When you're on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that. Nobody who's doing it ever talks about anything else.

Related Characters: Davis Pickett Jr. (speaker), Aza Holmes
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 162
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

As I looked at his face looking at mine, I realized the light that made him visible to me came mostly from a cycle: Our screens were lighting each of us with light from the other's bedroom. I could only see him because he could see me.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Davis Pickett Jr.
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 191
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Daisy, Ayala
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:

It's just, like, this isn't going to be some story where the poor, penniless girl gets rich and then realizes that truth matters more than money and establishes her heroism by going back to being the poor, penniless girl, okay?

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Daisy, Davis Pickett, Sr.
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

It was saying that my bacteria were affecting my thinking--maybe not directly, but through the information they told my gut to send to my brain. Maybe you're not even thinking this thought. Maybe your thinking's infected.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker)
Related Symbols: Bacteria (C. diff), Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 210
Explanation and Analysis:

Please just let me out. Whoever is authoring me, let me up out of this. Anything to be out of this.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker)
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 211
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

... the stupidity of Ayala, Aza, and Holmesy and all my irreconcilable selves, my self-absorption, the filth in my gut, think about anything other than yourself you disgusting narcissist.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Ayala
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 21 Quotes

My whole life I thought I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along.

Related Characters: Daisy (speaker), Aza Holmes
Page Number: 241
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

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 own.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Daisy, Mychal
Page Number: 257
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24 Quotes

I would always be like this, always have this within me. There was no beating it. I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me. My self and the disease were knotted together for life.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker)
Page Number: 280
Explanation and Analysis:

... I realized something Davis must have already known: Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker), Davis Pickett Jr.
Related Symbols: The Sky, Stars, and Astronomy
Page Number: 280
Explanation and Analysis:

I know that girl would go on, that she would grow up, have children and love them, that despite loving them she would get too sick to care for them, be hospitalized, get better, and then get sick again. I know a shrink would say, Write it down, how you got here.
So you would, and in writing it down you realize, love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift.

Related Characters: Aza Holmes (speaker)
Related Symbols: Circles and Spirals
Page Number: 285
Explanation and Analysis: