Looking for Alaska

by John Green

I didn’t say much—partly because no one asked me any questions and partly because I just wanted to eat as much as I could.

“Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”

It’s from an Aleut word, Alyeska. It means ‘that which the sea breaks against,’ and I love that.

“Sometimes I don’t get you,” I said. She didn’t even glance at me. She just smiled toward the television and said, “You never get me. That’s the whole point.”

You live for pretentious metaphors.”

Problem with you is that if you talk to her you’ll ‘uh um uh’ your way to disaster.”

You’ve violated the sacred covenant between women! How will stabbing one another in the back help women to rise above patriarchal oppression?!’

I ate some. She ate some.

Five layers between us.

This was not one of those times.

“I just did some calculations, and I’ve been able to determine that you’re full of shit.”

“I’m just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them.”

maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me.

How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?”

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 a hurricane.

But I still ruin everything.

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.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow

“Pudge, what you must understand about me is that I am a deeply unhappy person.”

Never have I so wanted to be Crest Complete.

She tasted like cigarettes and Mountain Dew and wine and Chap Stick.

People do not just die. I can’t catch my breath.

That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it,

How long is an instant?

“Straight and fast. Straight and fast. Out of the labyrinth.”

“You can’t just make me different and then leave,”

A woman so strong she burns heaven and drenches hell.

‘Everything that comes together falls apart,’”

I’d finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered.

a message of radical hope.

When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself.

we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.

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.