Looking For Alaska Quotes

“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

“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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
― François Rabelais

“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

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

“I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“We all use the future to escape the present.”
― John Green

“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 hurricane.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“We are greater than the sum of our parts.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I'm really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.”
― John Green

“You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I can't remember, because I never knew.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Alaska finished her cigarette and flicked it into the river.
'Why do you smoke so damn fast?' I asked.
She looked at me and smiled widely, and such a wide smile on her narrow face might have looked goofy were it not for the unimpeachably elegant green in her eyes. She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, 'Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.”
― John Green

“Suffering is universal. it’s the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.”
― John Green

“How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps. That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I didn't know what to say to her - I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.”
― John Green

“This is so much fun, but I’m so sleepy. To be continued?”
― John Green

“But there was so much todo: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I'll have more time for reading when I'm old and boring.”
― John Green

“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, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi's headrest, and I
cried, whimpering, and I didn't even feel sadness so much as pain.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think we are invincible because we are.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I finally found something that can stop the fox. The fox cannot summit Strawberry Hill.” - Takumi”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Ya'll smoke to enjoy. I smoke to die.”
― John Green

“I’m just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them.”
― 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 accicide, the student, would never be anything else, and I was left to ask, Did I help you toward a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I assist your willful self-destruction? Because they are different crimes, and I didn't know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“The Colonel explained to me that 1. this was Alaska's room, and that 2. she had a single room because the girl who was supposed to be her roommate got kicked out at the end of last year, and that 3. Alaska had cigarettes, although the Colonel neglected to ask whether 4. I smoked, which 5. I didn't.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting.”
― John Green

“In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla,”
― John Green