Quotes on Looking For Alaska Book

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

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.

You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different.

We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.

At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.

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.

Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "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.

But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep... 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 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'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?

That's the mystery, isn't it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape---the world or the end of it?

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.

I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life.

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.

And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.

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.