Looking for Alaska

by John Green

“Huh?” I asked. “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.”

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.

I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.

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

At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze,

she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes,

When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did.

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.

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.

It may be cliché and unmemorable, but I would be very grateful indeed if my last words were of love to those with whom I have shared this brief and wondrous flicker of life.