“What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy
person.”
"How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?"
How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?
Read more at: http://www.loveaquote.com/books/looking-for-alaska-quotes/
How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?
Read more at: http://www.loveaquote.com/books/looking-for-alaska-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."
“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.”
"Straight and fast."
“Thomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over there'. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.”
"I go to seek a Great Perhaps."
“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.”
“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.”
“When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.”
“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 hurricane.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I may die young, but at least I'll die smart.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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”
“At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.”
“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.”
“Have you really read all those books in your room?”
Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.”
“And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.”
“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.”
“I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going.”
“Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war”
“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.”
“We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.”
“That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.”
“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?”
“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.”
“The Colonel led all the cheers.
Cornbread!" he screamed.
CHICKEN!" the crowd responded.
Rice!"
PEAS!"
And then, all together: "WE GOT HIGHER SATs."
Hip Hip Hip Hooray!" the Colonel cried.
YOU'LL BE WORKIN' FOR US SOMEDAY!”
“I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn't hate people who watched or played them.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”
“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.”
“We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken.”
“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.”
“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.”
“And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I've been smart longer.”
“She's cute, I thought, but you don't need to like a girl who treats you like you're ten: You've already got a mom.”
“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape 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.”
“We were kissing.
I thought: This is good.
I thought: I am not bad at this kissing. Not bad at all.
I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe.
Suddenly she laughed and pulled away from me. She wiggled a hand out of her sleeping bag and wiped her face. "You slobbered
on my nose," she said, and laughed”
“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.”
“But a lot of times, 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.”
“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.”
“I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.”
“There are times when it is appropriate, even preferable, to get an erection when someone's face is in close proximity to your penis.
This was not one of those times.”
“I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.”
“At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.”
“She said, "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?... Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.”
“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.”
“Because memories fall apart, too. And you're left with nothing.”
“Entropy increases. Things fall apart.”
“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.”
“I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.”
“The nature of the labyrinth, I scribbled into my spiral notebook, and the way out of it. This teacher rocked. I hated discussion classes. I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn't sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it. I'm in class, so teach me.”
“We are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.”
“He—that's Simon Bolivar—was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. Damn it," he sighed. "'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!'
"So what's the labyrinth?" I asked her.
"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?”
“Scared isn't a good excuse. Scared is the excuse everyone has always used.”
“For a moment, she was quiet. Then she grabbed my hand, whispered, “Run run run run run,” and took off, pulling me behind her.”
“So why don't you go home for vacations?' I asked her.
I'm just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them.”
“I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life..”
“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 undertow- that, in short, we are all going.”
“Principled hate is a hell of a lot stronger than "Boy, I wish you hadn't mummified me and thrown me into the lake" hate.”
“It's the eternal struggle, Pudge. The good versus the naughty. ...
Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.”
“We got off at the next exit, quietly, and, switching drivers, we walked in front of the car. We met and I held him, my hands balled into tight fists around his shoulders, and he wrapped his short arms around me and squeezed tight, so that I felt the heaves of his chest as we realized over and over again that we were still alive. I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, 'God we must look so lame,' but it doesn't matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.”
“We didn't talk much. But we didn't need to.”
“If drunk were cookies, I'd be Famous Amos”
“We are greater than the sum of our parts.”
"Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person."
"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?"
“…it was nice, you know, having someone you could always fight with.”
"JFK," she says.
"That's obvious," I said.
"Oh, is it now? She asked.
“No.Those were his last words. Someone said, ‘Mr.President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, and then he said, ‘That’s obvious,’ and then he got shot."
Alaska laughed. “God, that’s awful. I shouldn’t laugh. But I will."
"Oh. I should have mentioned that earlier. This isn’t milk. It’s five parts milk and one part vodka. I call it ambrosia - drink of the gods. You can barely smell the vodka in the milk, so the Eagle can’t catch me unless he actually takes a sip."
“I mean, it’s stupid to miss someone you didn’t even get along with.”
“Your turn, buddy” said the Colonel to Alaska. She lay on her back, her hands locked behind her head. She spoke softly and quickly. “The day after my mom took me to the zoo where she liked the monkeys and I liked the bears. It was a Friday. I came home from school. She gave me a hug and told me to do my homework in my room. I went into my room, and she sat down at the kitchen table, I guess, and then she screamed, and I ran out, and she had fallen over. She was lying on the floor, holding her head and jerking. And I freaked out. I should have called 911, but I just started screaming and crying until finally she stopped jerking, and I thought she had fallen asleep and that whatever had hurt didn’t hurt anymore. So I just sat there on the floor with her until my dad got home an hour later, and he’s screaming. ‘Why didn’t you call 911?’ and trying to give her CPR, but by then she was plenty dead. Aneurysm. Worst day. I win. You drink.”
“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.”
“’That swan is the spawn of Satan. Never get closer to it than we are now.’ ‘Why’ ‘It has some issues with people. It was abused or something. It’ll rip you to pieces.’”
“Buy! Sell! Trade! Barter! You’re much bigger, but we’re much smarter!”
“It’s like my mom always says: ‘Ya think you’s a-walkin’ on water, but turns out you just got piss in your shoes."
"…the glittering ambiguity of a girl’s smile, which seems to promise an answer to the question but never gives it. The question, the one we’ve all been asking since girls stopped being gross, the question that is too simple to be uncomplicated: Does she like me or like me?”
“Pudge,” the Colonel said. “Because you’re skinny. It’s called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now,
let’s go get some cigarettes and start this year off right.”
"Alaska came to my room, sobbing. She sat down on the couch, whimpering and screaming.
"What’s wrong?” I asked.
When she could talk, she said “I don’t understand why I screw everything up.”
“What, like ‘ratting’ on Marya? Maybe you were just scared.”
“Scared isn’t a good excuse ” she shouted into the couch. “But I told the Colonel about my
ratting on Marya. He said he’d never let me out of his sight during pranks. That he couldn’t trust me
on my own. And I don’t blame him. I don’t even trust me.”
“It took guts to tell him,” I said
“I have guts, just not when it counts.”
‘I don’t want to upset you, but maybe you just need to tell us all why you told on Marya. Were you scared of being sent home?”
“There’s no home.”
“Well, you have a family,”
“I try not to be scared, you know. But I still ruin everything. I still fuck up.”
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