Looking for Alaska: Best Quotes
“Francois Rabelais. He was this 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.” (p 5)
“At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.” (p 7)
“Things never happened like I imagined them.” (p 8)
“He - that’s Simon Bolivar - was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at the moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. “Damn it,” he said. “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!” (p 18-19)
“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? (p 19)
“Feeling - probably for the first time in my life - the fear and excitement of living in a place where you never know what’s going to happen or when.” (p 29)
“For we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?” (p 32)
“I’ve never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one. in the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.” (p 33)
“I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do. I’m a bad boyfriend. She’s a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other.” (p 38)
“Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.” (p 44)
“And it occured to me that I could have made up any last words for Millard Fillmore and Kevin probably would have believed me if I’d used that same tone of voice, the Colonel’s confidence rubbing off on me.” (p 48)
“I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.” (p 49)
“Be present in this class. And then, when it’s over, be present out there.” (p 90)
“I may die young,” she said. “But at least I’ll die smart.” (p 52)
“It’s from an Aleut word, Alyeska. It means ‘that which the sea breaks against,’ and I love that. But at the time. I just saw Alaska up there. And it was big, just like I wanted to be. And it was damn far away from Vine Station, Alabama, just like i wanted to be.” (p 53)
“Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re going to do. I’m just gonna do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.” (p 55)
“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll secape 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.” (p 55)
“You never get. That’s the whole point.” (p 55)
“Sometime you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.” (p 56)
“God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.” (p 71)
“I’m just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them.” (p 80)
“because I do, Alaska Young, I do love you and what else matters but that.” (p 82)
“It’s not life or death, the labyrinth.” “Um, okay. So what is it?” “Suffering,” she said. “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?” (p 82)
“They love their hair because they aren’t smart enough to love something more interesting.” (p 84)
“You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart.”(p 85)
“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. NOt even have sex. 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 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 a hurricane.” (p 88)
“Night falls fast. Today is in the past.” (p 89)
“Don’t you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don’t love the crazy, sullen bitch.” (p 96)
“I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.” (p 100)
“The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible.” (p 103)
“Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox.” (p 104)
“Tonight, we were invincible.” (p 107)
“There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertown - that, in short, we are all going.” (p 120)
“We are all going,” McKinley said to his wife, and we sure are. There’s your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. FInd your way out of that one.” (p 121)
“Pudge, what you must understand about me is that I am a deeply unhappy person.” (p 124)
“But a lot of time, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.” (p 128)
“I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.” ( p 142)
“And now she was colder by the hour, more dead with every breath I took, I thought: 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 told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.” (p 144)
“More than anything I felt the unfairness of it. the inarguable injustice of living someone who might have loved you back but can’t due to deadness.” (p 151)
“Meriwether Lewis’s last words were, : I am not a coward, but I am so strong. So hard to die.” I don’t doubt that it is, but it cannot be much harder than being left behind.” (p 151)
“Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you,” and the Colonel whispered, “I’m so sorry, Pudge. I know you did,” and I said, “No. Not past tense.” (p 152)
“At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.” (p 158)
“It’s like now you only care about the Alaska you made up.” (p 165)
“And maybe it was only because Alaska couldn’t hit the brakes and I couldn’t hit the accelerator. Maybe she just had an odd kind of courage that I lacked, but no. (p 167)
“I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn’t think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, pr maybe a couple weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.” ( p 172)
“I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?” (p 172)
“You can’t just make me different and then leave,” I said out loud to her. “Because I was fine before, Alaska. I was fine with just me and last words and school friends, and you can’t just make me different and die.” 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.” (p 172)
“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 hell, but because He is God.” (p 174)
“A woman so strong she burns heaven and drenches hell.” (p 174)
“I’m tired of you acting like you were the only guy who ever wanted her. Like you had some monopoly on liking her.” (p 185)
“And, anyway, we didn’t know how much it might mean. Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die.” (p 187)
“Everything that comes together falls apart.” (p 196)
“The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we learned, and that cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you stopped suffering when they did.” (p 196)
“Because memories fall apart, too. And then you’re left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow.” (p 196)
“She didn’t leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.” (p 212)
“An ambulance… I almost wished it was someone I knew, to give new form and depth to this sadness I still felt.” (p 213)
“It shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.” (p 213)
“But it doesn’t much matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.” (p 214)
“What is your cause for hope?” (p 215)
“After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out - but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.” (p 215)
“I know you loved her. It was hard not to.” (p 218)
“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.” (p 218)
“I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.” (p 218)
And of course the long letter on pages 219 - 221
snowghoul
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
jacobvanloon
2087
origamiaround
