“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, Looking for Alaska

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Thomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over there'. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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, Looking for Alaska

“What the hell is that?" I laughed.
"It's my fox hat."
"Your fox hat?"
"Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat."
"Why are you wearing your fox hat?" I asked.
"Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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 instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“It's not because I want to make out with her."
Hold on." He grabbed a pencil and scrawled excitedly at the paper as if he'd just made a mathematical breakthrough and then looked back up at me. "I just did some calculations, and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. 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. And as I walked back to give Takumi’s note to the Colonel, I saw that I would never know. I would never know her well enough to know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if she left us on purpose. But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I may die young, but at least I'll die smart.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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, Looking for Alaska

“I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Have you really read all those books in your room?”

Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“The Colonel led all the cheers.
Cornbread!" he screamed.
CHICKEN!" the crowd responded.
Rice!"
PEAS!"
And then, all together: "WE GOT HIGHER SATs."
Hip Hip Hip Hooray!" the Colonel cried.
YOU'LL BE WORKIN' FOR US SOMEDAY!”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Don't you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don't love the crazy, sullen bitch.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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, Looking for Alaska

“It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where girls' bodies ease from one place to another, from arc to the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to wait to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I'd noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“and we're just chatting and then I'm in the middle of a sentence about analogies or something and like a hawk he reaches down and he honks my boob. HONK. A much-too-firm, two- to three-second HONK. And the first thing I thought was Okay, how do I extricate this claw from my boob before it leaves permanent marks? and the second thing I thought was God, I can't wait to tell Takumi and the Colonel.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“When you're walking home at night, do you even get creeped out and even though it's silly and embarrassing you just want to run home?"
It seemed too secret and personal to admit to virtual stranger, but I told her, "Yeah, totally."
For a moment, she was quiet. Then she grabbed my hand, whispered, "Run run run run run," and took off, pulling me behind her.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Comment dis-tu 'Oh my God, I don't know nearly enough French to pass French II' en français?”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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, Looking for Alaska

“Oh shit did you just dis the feminine gender
I'll pummel your ass then stick you in a blender
You think I like Tori and Ani so I can't rhyme
But I got flow like Ghostbusters got slime
Objectify women and it's fuckin' on
You'll be dead and gone like ancient Babylon.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking how you'll escape 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, Looking for Alaska

“I can't be mad at you, you harmless scrawny bastard.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“And I vaguely remember her smiling at me from the door way the glittering ambiguity of a girls smile, which seems to promise an answer to the question, but never gives it. The question, the one we’ve all been asking since girls stopped being gross, the question that is to simple to be uncomplicated: Does she like me or does she LIKE me?”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seem running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“It's only forever...
Not long at all.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“So she became impulsive, scared by her inaction into perpetual action. When the Eagle confronted her with the expulsion, maybe she blurted out Marya's name because it was the first that came to mind, because in that moment she didn't want to get expelled and she couldn't think past that moment. She was scared, sure. But more importantly, maybe she'd been scared of being paralyzed by fear again.

~Miles/Pudge on Alaska, pg 120-121”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. 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, Looking for Alaska

“Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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, Looking for Alaska

“I must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Not to ask the obvious question, but why Alaska?”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re gonna do. I’m just going to do it. 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, Looking for Alaska

“I don't suppose I can wear the flamingo tie," he said as he pulled on black socks.
"It's a bit festive, given the occasion," I responded.
"Can't wear it to the opera," said the Colonel, almost smiling. "Can't wear it to a funeral. Can't use it to hang myself. It's a bit useless, as ties go." I gave him a tie.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I didn't know whether to trust Alaska, and I'd certainly had enough of her unpredictability - cold one day, sweet the next; irresistibly flirty one moment, resistibly obnoxious the next. I preferred the Colonel: At least when he was cranky, he had a reason.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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, Looking for Alaska

“You can fight with me," I said. I put my controller down and leaned back on our foam couch and was asleep. As I drifted off, I heard the Colonel say, "I can't be mad at you, you harmless skinny bastard.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“We didn't have sex. We never got naked. I never touched her bare breast, and her hands never got lower than my hips. It didn't matter. As she slept, I whispered, "I love you, Alaska Young.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I hated cranberry sauce, but for some reason my mom persisted in her lifelong belief that it was my very favorite food, even though every single Thanksgiving I politely declined to include it on my plate.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I am concussed," I announced, entirely sure of my self-diagnosis.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska