Looking for Alaska

by John Green

But there is so much to do: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I’ll have more time for reading when I’m old and boring.”

“I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do. I’m a bad boyfriend. She’s a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other.”

“Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re gonna do. I’m just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.”

You just use the future to escape the present.”

“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 will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.”

the best personal answer I had to “What happens to people after they die?” was “Well, something. Maybe.”

“I just did some calculations, and I’ve been able to determine that you’re full of shit.”

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

“Karl Marx famously called religion ‘the opiate of the masses.’ Buddhism, particularly as it is popularly practiced, promises improvement through karma. Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come.

because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we’d learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did.

It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.

If you find something useful or true in a story, it is useful and true regardless of whether the author put it there on purpose. —JG

I’ve always sort of preferred people who are not entirely likable.

This is the most insidious thing about depression, I think: It makes itself more powerful by dragging you away from the world outside of yourself.

The truth is that in our lives we are all going to encounter questions that should be answered, that deserve to be answered, and yet prove unanswerable.