Looking for Alaska

by John Green

I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read. 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.”

“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.”

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

I talked about why I thought it was an important question. 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.

The five of us walking confidently in a row, I’d never felt cooler. The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible. The plan may have had faults, but we did not.

And now she was colder by the hour, more dead with every breath I took.

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.

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

He 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!”

“Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze,

‘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.’”

‘Everything that comes together falls apart,’” the Old Man said. “Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.”

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.

we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth.

It is often translated “that which the sea breaks against,”

Why does the text switch from past to present tense around Alaska’s death? Have you shifted tense in other books? I’m quite fond of tense changes. I used them in Paper Towns. I ALMOST used them in The Fault in Our Stars, but Julie (rightly) talked me out of it. (Originally, TFIOS moved between past and present tense almost every paragraph, which was a bit much.) So when I am telling a story, I switch a lot between past and present tense. I might be like, “So I was driving down the street and then BOOM a deer jumps out of the woods and almost hits my car, and I almost peed my pants.” That’s a grammatically disastrous sentence, but the reason I switch tenses there is because when describing the moment of crisis—the deer jumping out into the street—I feel as if it is still happening, and I want to express to you that it was so intense that on some level the experience is not over. We like to be very rigid in the way we imagine tense—some things are happening, other things have happened, etc. But one of the reasons we’ve created SO MANY tenses in English is that the way we actually experience time is quite complicated. When Pudge is talking about Alaska’s death, he is telling you a story that for him is still happening, a story that he hasn’t processed and put behind him. For me at least, that’s how trauma works. As Faulkner famously put it, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

I really liked this passage/ Q&A.

When and how did you find your Great Perhaps? Oh, I think the pleasure is in the seeking. That’s what I eventually realized.

What would you say, today, to a kid like Alaska? You are helpful, and you are loved, and you are forgiven, and you are not alone.