John Green, Looking for Alaska
101 quotes
"... if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane."
"What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding in an hour."
"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."
"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!"
"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."
"Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, '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."
"Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone's about to die."
"She cannot possibly be dead, people do not just die"
"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." She wasn't even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense."
"The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was."
"I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering."
"You know what's lame, Pudge? I really care about her. I mean, we were hopeless. Badly matched. But still. I mean, I said I loved her... I mean, it's stupid to miss someone you didn't even get along with. but I don't know, it was nice, you know, having someone you could always fight with."
"I wouldn't have cared if my girlfriend was a Jaguar-driving Cyclops with a beard - I'd have been grateful just to have someone to make out with."
"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"
"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"
"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"
"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."
"The pigs can't stop the fox; I'm too quick,' Takumi said to himself. "I can rhyme while I run; I'm that slick."
"This one's for Alaska Young!"
"AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!' he screamed.'So that's Sara,' I said.'Yes.''She seems nice."
"Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart."
"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."
"That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it."
"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."