Looking for Alaska

by John Green

At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.

Avoidant attachment style core !!

In those fifty minutes, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I’d never been religious, 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.

partly because I thought it was true and partly because I just felt like disagreeing with her.

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 guess I stay with her because she stays with me.

“the only real geniuses are artists:

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

I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn’t hate people who watched or played them.

Not the brightest gem in the jewelry shop, but you’ve got to admire his single-minded dedication to drug abuse.”

“So they just suck?” I asked. I didn’t quite understand the point of watching your terrible team get walloped,

Tennessee Titans <3

“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.”

I've been stuck in the same town for what seems like over a decade. I keep leaving, coming back, leaving, promising I'm going to get out one day, and yet...I'm still fucking here.

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

You thought she was quietly discussing precalc, when she was clearly talking about having hot sex with you.

lmao

We haven’t had a pleasant moment this whole year. Ever since I got here, I mean, we were just on each other relentlessly. I should have been nicer to her. I don’t know. It’s sad.”

Me + My mom

“I mean, it’s stupid to miss someone you didn’t even get along with. But, I don’t know, it was nice, you know, having someone you could always fight with.”

God, ‘I love you’ really is the gateway drug of breaking up.

Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and 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.

it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food.

“Scared isn’t a good excuse!” she shouted into the couch. “Scared is the excuse everyone has always used!”

People, I thought, wanted security. 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. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.

Hating the cool kids takes an awful lot of energy, and I’d given up on it a long time ago.

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.

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.

“At least it was instant. At least there wasn’t any pain.” I knew he was only trying to help, but he didn’t get it. There was pain. A dull endless pain in my gut that wouldn’t go away

More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can’t due to deadness,

I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them,

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

Yeah... Felt that.

‘I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.’”

“After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out—but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.”

desk empty; an outline of dust where his stereo had been. He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that 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 okay at the time because we could not see the future. 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.

sometimes, think that maybe “the afterlife” is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss,

I used to think that our breakup caused my nearly catastrophic period of depression that fall, but now I understand that my depression at least in part caused the breakup.