Olivia > Olivia's Quotes

“When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. 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 forget that when they get old. 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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) 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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“What the hell is that?" I laughed.
"It's my fox hat."
"Your fox hat?"
"Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat."
"Why are you wearing your fox hat?" I asked.
"Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. 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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“It's not because I want to make out with her."
Hold on." He grabbed a pencil and scrawled excitedly at the paper as if he'd just made a mathematical breakthrough and then looked back up at me. "I just did some calculations, and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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. And as I walked back to give Takumi’s note to the Colonel, I saw that I would never know. I would never know her well enough to know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if she left us on purpose. But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I may die young, but at least I'll die smart.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Sometimes I don't get you,' I said.
She didn't even glance at me. She just smiled toward the television and said, 'You never get me. That's the whole point.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I just did some calculations and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“For she had embodied the Great Perhaps--she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“After all this time, it seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out- but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible for me. And the accident, the suicide, would never be anything else, and I was left to ask, Did I help you to a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I jsut assist in your willful self-destruction? Because they are different crimes, and I didn't know wheter to feel angry at myself for letting go.
But we knew what could be found out, and in finding out, she had made us closer- the Colonel adn Takumi and me, anyway. And that was it. She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Someday 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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“We didn't talk much. But we didn't need to.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Too pissed off to cry, I said, 'This is only making me hate her. I don't want to hate her. And what's the point, if that's all it's making me do?' Still refusing to answer how and why questions. Still insisting on an aura of mystery.
I leaned forward, head between by knees, and the Colonel placed a head on my upper back. 'The point is that there are always alsweres, Pudge.' And then he pushed air out between his pursed lips and I could hear the angry quiver in his voice as he repeated, 'There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.'
~Miles/Pudge and Chip/the Colonel, pg 168”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I'm the Sun Summoner. It gets dark when I say it does.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising