Looking For Alaska Book Quotes by John Green, Barack Obama, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Simon Bolivar and many others.
Why don’t we break up? I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do.
But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.
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.
People believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.
She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor.
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?
She left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.
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.
It’s not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.
I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life.
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.
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.
You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth.
What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant.
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 not knowing would not keep me from caring.
I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.
