Looking For Alaska Book Quotes

When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. ~ John Green

The labyrinth blows, but I choose it. ~ John Green

In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla, ~ John Green

Why don't we break up? I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that's not an easy thing to do. ~ John Green

If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless. ~ John Green

It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering? ~ John Green

What you must understand about me is that I'm a deeply unhappy person. ~ John Green

When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart,
you'd stop suffering when they did. ~ John Green

People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to. ~ John Green

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. ( ... ) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present. ~ John Green

I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life.. ~ John Green

How long have you been dating her?' I asked.
Nine months. We never got along. I mean, I didn't even briefly like her. Like, my mom and my dad- my dad would get pissed, and then he would beat the shit out of my mom. And then my dad would be all nice and they'd have a honeymoon period. But with Sara, there's never a honeymoon period. God, how could she think I was a rat? I know, I know: Why don't we break up?' He ran a hand through his hair, clutching a fistful of it atop his head, and said, ' I guess I saty with her because she stays with me. And that's not an easy thing to do. I'm a bad boyfriend. She's a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other. ~ John Green

We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken. ~ John Green

What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous. ~ Anonymous

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. ~ John Green

I thought at first she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her-green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs-would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere.

I still think that, sometimes. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just a matter, and matter gets recycled. ~ John Green

And I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart slowly, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and nothing but herself and her mom in those last moments as she spent as a person. ~ John Green

Pudge/Colonel:
"I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself.

But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss,

I guess. And I had this secret.
You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how

I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide.

She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would ~ John Green

Teenagers think they're invincible ~ John Green

I finally found something that can stop the fox. The fox cannot summit Strawberry Hill. - Takumi ~ John Green

More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone
who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi's headrest, and I
cried, whimpering, and I didn't even feel sadness so much as pain. ~ John Green

ALSO BY JOHN GREEN Looking for Alaska ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... An Abundance of Katherines ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Paper Towns ... ... ... ... ... ... Will Grayson, Will Grayson WITH DAVID LEVITHAN ~ John Green

But there was so much todo: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I'll have more time for reading when I'm old and boring. ~ John Green

JG: Ha! I will get him Looking for Alaska and tell him this idea that a human being is more than a human being is a mistaken idea and in the end does no service either to him or the person he's imagining. That trope has become so deeply embedded in American culture, and as someone who writes about young people falling in love, I feel like I can't ignore it, but I try to make it clear that life works best when we think of people as people. ~ John Green

There's your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. Find your way out of that maze. ~ John Green

Alaska finished her cigarette and flicked it into the river.
'Why do you smoke so damn fast?' I asked.
She looked at me and smiled widely, and such a wide smile on her narrow face might have looked goofy were it not for the unimpeachably elegant green in her eyes. She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, 'Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die. ~ John Green

This one's for Alaska Young! ~ John Green

It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things. ~ John Green

Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. ~ John Green

I didn't know what to say to her - I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side. ~ John Green

After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out - but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it. Chip/Colonel ~ John Green

America is looking for answers. She's looking for a new direction; the world is looking for a light. That light can come from America's great North Star; it can come from Alaska. ~ Sarah Palin

Yeah," I said. "What is that? A bird? "It's the swan," he said. "Wow. A school with a swan. Wow."
"That swan is the spawn of Satan. Never get closer to it than we are now. ~ John Green

So instead of naming me Harmony or Mary, they agreed to let me decide ... And then on my seventh birthday, my present was that I got to pick my name. Cool, huh? So I spent the whole day looking at my dad's globe for a really cool name. And so my first choice was Chad, like the country in Africa. But then my dad said that was a boy's name, so I picked Alaska. ~ John Green

People often called us perfectionists, but we were not looking for perfection. We were looking for some kind of magic in the music. ~ Paul Simon

That deep, can-still-taste-her-in-my-mouth sleep. ~ John Green

The Colonel explained to me that 1. this was Alaska's room, and that 2. she had a single room because the girl who was supposed to be her roommate got kicked out at the end of last year, and that 3. Alaska had cigarettes, although the Colonel neglected to ask whether 4. I smoked, which 5. I didn't. ~ John Green

Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning,' and Isben looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he died. ~ John Green

Why do you smoke so damn fast?"
"Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die. ~ John Green

I'm really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what. ~ John Green

They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

We skipped stones across the creek, which sounds dumb but it wasn't. I don't know. Like the way the sun is right now, with the long shadows and that kind of bright, soft light you get when the sun isn't quite setting? That's the light that makes everything better, everything prettier, and today, everything just seems to be in that light. ~ John Green

If you took all the killing in Star Wars and replaced it with fucking, you'd have an R-rated movie instead of PG. You ask me what's wrong with society? That's what's fucking wrong with society, that's everything that's wrong with society. From the age we're old enough to watch Star Wars we're told that sexuality is something we should be shy and timid about, while violence makes us heroes. Something we were designed to do is secret and shameful. Something we should never do is how we get things done. Star Wars is a great movie, don't get me wrong, but if you think its more acceptable for children than Looking For Alaska, because of the latter's sexual content, then your view of what it means to be human is seriously disturbed. ~ Max Davine

Ya'll smoke to enjoy. I smoke to die. ~ John Green

How will we ever get out, straight and fast, of this labyrinth of suffering? ~ John Green

That didn't happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them. ~ John Green

I went to Alaska as a young man just looking for adventure. And like so many of us in the '70s, we found it. ~ Tom Bodett

I learned that myth doesn't mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting. ~ John Green

Tuesday - we had school for the first time. Madame O'Malley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling.

"Awful," a girl said.

"En français," Madame O'Malley replied. "En français. ~ John Green

Make sure you're not expecting cute. This isn't Looking For Alaska. ~ Hannah Moskowitz

I thought it might be a fine time to say the Three Little Words. And I steeled myself to say them as I stared up at that starriest night, convinced myself that she felt it, too, that her hand so alive and vivid against my leg was more than playful, and fuck Lara and fuck Jake because I do, Alaska Young, I do love you and what else matters but that and my lips parted to speak and before I could even begin to breathe out the words, she said, It's not life or death, the labyrinth. ~ John Green

And on that thin-mooned night, I could see little more than her silhoutte except for when she smoked, the burning cherry of the cigarette washing her face in pale red light. ~ John Green

At this point, any scientist, doctor, journalist, or policy maker who denies or minimizes the importance of a whole food, plant-based diet for individual and societal well-being simply isn't looking clearly at the facts. There's just too much good evidence to ignore anymore. ~ T. Colin Campbell

When i have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins, then run around the mall looking frantic. ~ Steven Wright

The thing is, I fell in love with Luke, not Cary. Fell for the sheen and the sweat, the adrenalin of the hunt. Faltered, reeled, collapsed. There was no falling with Cary. Loving him was gradual and logical, inevitable as the path of a glacier. But Luke was a thunderclap, appearing out of a clear blue sky, soaking me to my skin, then moving on leaving everything looking different. And post-Luke nothing was the same. ~ Kylie Ladd

For the various spiritual forms of the imagination have a natural affinity with certain sensuous forms of art - and to discern the qualities of each art, to intensify as well its limitations as its powers of expression, is one of the aims that culture sets before us. It is not an increased moral sense, an increased moral supervision that your literature needs. Indeed, one should never talk of a moral or an immoral poem - poems are either well written or badly written, that is all. And, indeed, any element of morals or implied reference to a standard of good or evil in art is often a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision, often a note of discord in the harmony of an imaginative creation; for all good work aims at a purely artistic effect. 'We must be careful,' said Goethe, 'not to be always looking for culture merely in what is obviously moral. Everything that is great promotes civilisation as soon as we are aware of it. ~ Oscar Wilde

Albert Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for the discovery of vitamin C, once offered the opinion that "life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest. ~ Sean Carroll

Fawn face, the expression a deer makes not when it's caught in headlights but when it catches a human looking at it in wonder. The deer looks back, acknowledging not only its own terror but its own grace, and it shows off for a moment in front of the human. It flirts. ~ Meg Wolitzer

For doing so, and who prefer certainties to doubts. Join with those who are open and not afraid to be vulnerable: they understand that people can only improve once they start looking at what their fellows are doing, not in order to judge them, but to admire them for their dedication and courage. ~ Paulo Coelho

If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other. ~ Amory Lovins

If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying. It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can't we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change. ~ Alan Moore

I was looking for a way to be someone else,'I said. ~ Scott Frost