Looking for Alaska

by John Green

‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps.’

Because you simply cannot draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.

thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

“French, Feel, Finger, Fuck.

I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.

“We are all going.”

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—that, in short, we are all going.

But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.

How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? —A. Y.

‘the opiate of the masses.’

‘Everything that comes together falls apart,’

we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.

Those awful things are survivable, because 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.