I have been meaning to blog about the awesomeness of John Green's book, Looking for Alaska, for several days now.. and so now I will slap down some amazing quotes from it so you'll all be inspired to check it out yourself.
"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." -Alaska Young
"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 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." -Miles 'Pudge' Halter
"It was not an eventful day. I should have done extraordinary things. I should have sucked the marrow out of life. But on that day, I slept 18 hours out of a possible 24." -Miles 'Pudge' Halter
"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. I could call everything the Colonel said & did 'fine.' I could try to pretend that I didn't care anymore, but it could never be true again. You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I can't remember, because I never knew." -Miles 'Pudge' Halter
"Don't ever do anything like that again.. But Lord, 'subverting the patriarchal paradigm'- its like she wrote the speech." -The Eagle
"I believe we must finally conclude that each brought a message of radical hope. To 17th century Arabia, Muhammed brought the promise that anyone could find fulfillment & everlasting life through allegiance to the one true God. The Buddha held out hope that suffering could be transcended. Jesus brought the message that the last shall be first, that even the tax collectors and lepers- the outcasts- had cause for hope. And so that is the question I leave you with in this final: 'What is your cause for
hope?" -Miles 'Pudge' Halter
"After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out- but I chose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it." -the Colonel
"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.... 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. ... But not knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart... She deverved better friends." -Miles 'Pudge' Halter
"..she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be... We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken... Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations... So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison's last words were, 'Its very beautiful over there.' I don't know where there is, but I believe its somewhere, and I hope its beautiful." -Miles 'Pudge' Halter
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