Looking for Alaska

by John Green

I learned that 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.

She’s cute, I thought, but you don’t need to like a girl who treats you like you’re ten: you’ve already got a mom.

“I may die young,” she said, “but at least I’ll die smart. Now, back to tangents.”

“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.”

“Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.”

the glittering ambiguity of a girl’s smile, which seems to promise an answer to the question but never gives it.

and showers became ludicrously inappropriate because the whole goddamned world had better water pressure than the showers.

I wasn’t sure whether I liked her, and I doubted whether I could trust her, but I cared at least enough to try to find out.

“We can’t love our neighbours till we know how crooked their hearts are.

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

people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.

The plan had faults, but we did not.

“Luck is for suckers,”

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

I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.

Meriwether Lewis’s last words were, “I am not a coward, but I am so strong. So hard to die.” I don’t doubt that it is, but it cannot be much harder than being left behind.

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

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die.

I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.

there is no best and no worst, that those judgements have no real meaning because there is only what is,

‘Everything that comes together falls apart,’”

The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: entropy increases. Things fall apart.”

Some day no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart too. And then you’re left with nothing, left not even with a ghost, but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else’s, dying again.

God we must look so lame, but it doesn’t much matter when you have just now realised, all the time later, that you are still alive.

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.

I still think that sometimes, think that maybe “the afterlife” is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable.

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska’s genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. 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.

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 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.

Thomas Edison’s last words were, “It’s very beautiful over there.” I don’t know where there is, but I know it’s some...