Looking for Alaska

by John Green

‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps.’

“He – that’s Simón Bolívar – was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. ‘Damn it,’ he sighed. ‘How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?’”

but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, in the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.

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.

“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.”

“Suffering,” she said. “Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That’s the problem. Bolívar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?”

“You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart,”

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

“Night falls fast. Today is in the past,”

“Luck is for suckers,”

“Best day of my life hasn’t happened yet. But I know it. I see it every day. The

“Now comes the mystery.”

It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.

Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.

The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.”

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 OK at the time because we could not see the future.

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 a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.

we are greater than the sum of our parts.

There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.

Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. 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.