"And I can see Russia from my house!"
— Tina Fay as Sarah Palin on SNL

"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 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 (Looking for Alaska)

"That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"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 (Looking for Alaska)

"I said nothing—I hadn’t known Marya, and anyway, “listening quietly” was my general social strategy"
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"…God, it’s over. Takumi, you gotta stop stealing other people’s problems and get some of your own."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"“Ashes to ashes. Garage sale to garage sale,” I said."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"thinking that if people were rain. i was drizzle and she was hurricane."
— John Green

"What is an 'instant death' anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is an instant? Nothing is instant."
— John Greene

"The name Alaska is probably an abbreviation of Unalaska, derived from the original Aleut word agunalaksh, which means "the shores where the sea breaks its back." The war between water and land is never-ending. Waves shatter themselves in spent fury against the rocky bulwarks of the coast; giant tides eat away the sand beaches and alter the entire contour of an island overnight; williwaw winds pour down the side of a volcano like snow sliding off a roof, building to a hundred-mile velocity in a matter of minutes and churning the ocean into a maelstrom where the stoutest vessels founder."
— Corey Ford (Where the Sea Breaks Its Back: The Epic Story of Early Naturalist Georg Steller and the Russian Exploration of Alaska)

"How will I ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? "
— John Green

"The climate of Barrow is Arctic. Temperatures range from cold as shit to fucking freezing."
— Steve Niles (30 Days of Night)

"The following obituary appeared in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph of Sept. 16, 1958:

A GREAT POET died last week in Lancieux, France, at the age of 84.

He was not a poet's poet. Fancy-Dan dilletantes will dispute the description "great."

He was a people's poet. To the people he was great. They understood him, and knew that any verse carrying the by-line of Robert W. Service would be a lilting thing, clear, clean and power-packed, beating out a story with a dramatic intensity that made the nerves tingle.

And he was no poor, garret-type poet, either. His stuff made money hand over fist. One piece alone, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, rolled up half a million dollars for him. He lived it up well and also gave a great deal to help others.

"The only society I like," he once said, "is that which is rough and tough - and the tougher the better. That's where you get down to bedrock and meet human people."

He found that kind of society in the Yukon gold rush, and he immortalized it."
— Robert W. Service