Book Lover’s Book Club – Looking for Alaska: Quote Post – Looking for Alaska: Quote Post
Hello Book lovers!
So this is the quote post for December’s BOTM: John Green’s “Looking for Alaska” I hope you all loved it as much as I do!
I organized it by day and page number according to my paperback copy.
It will be under the cut because it is SUPER long and because SPOILERS ARE EVIL and I don’t want to ruin the book for anyone who hasn’t read it!
Enjoy!
BEFORE
136 Days Before
1. “The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended only by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people.” – Page 4
2. “So this guy,” I said, standing in the doorway of the living room. “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.” –Page 5
128 Days Before
3. “Because you simply cannot draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.” – Page 7
4. “I’m Miles Halter. Nice to meet you.”
“Miles, as in ‘to go before I sleep’?” –Page 10
5. “It’s the swan,” he said.
“Wow. A school with a swan. Wow.”
“That swan is the spawn of Satan. Never get closer to it than we are now.” –Page 16
6. “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?” –Page 19
122 Days Before
7. “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.” – Page 38
110 Days Before
8. “I really would give you this clover. Except luck is for suckers.” She pinched the runt petal between the nails of her thumb and finger and plucked it. “There,” she said to the clover as she dropped it onto the ground. “Now you’re not a genetic freak anymore.” – Page 41
9. “Right here, by the river, you want me to kick it? / If your smoke was a Popsicle, I’d surely lick it / My rhymin’ is old school, sort of like the ancient Romans / The Colonel’s beats is sad like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman / Sometimes I’m accused of being a showman / ICanRhymeFast and I can rhyme slow, man.”
He paused, took a breath, and then finished.
“Like Emily Dickenson, I ain’t afraid of slant rhyme / And that’s the end of this verse; emcee’s out on a high.” – Page 44
10. “Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.” – Page 44
109 Days Before
11. “You ratted out Paul and Marya. We got you back. Truce?” Kevin asked.
“I didn’t rat them out. Pudge here certainly didn’t rat them out, but you brought him in on your fun. Truce? Hmmm, let me take a poll real quick.” The cheerleaders sat down, holding their pom-poms close to their chest as if praying. “Hey, Pudge,” the Colonel said. “What do you think of a truce?”
“It reminds me of when the Germans demanded that the U.S. surrender at the Battle of the Bulge,” I said. “I guess I’d say to this truce offer what General McAuliffe said to that one: Nuts.”
“Why would you try to kill this guy, Kevin? He’s a genius. Nuts to your truce.” – Page 47
101 Days Before
12. “As Alaska zipped through something obvious about linear equation, stoner/baller Hank Walsten said, “Wait, wait. I don’t get it.”
“That’s because you have eight functioning brain cells.”
“Studies show that marijuana is better for your health than those cigarettes,” Hank said.
Alaska swallowed a mouthful of French fries, took a drag on her cigarette, and blew smoke across the table at Hank. “I may die young,” she said. “But at least I’ll die smart. Now, back to tangents.” – Page 52
100 Days Before
13. “Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re gonna do. I’m just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.”
“Huh?” I asked.
“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.” – Page 54
99 Days Before
14. “You’re awfully philosophical for a girl that just got busted,” I told her.
“Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.” – Page 56
89 Days Before
15. “How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked.
“Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.”
“I like that book,” Alaska said.
“Yes.” The Colonel smiled and leaned over to look at her from his top bunk. “You would. Big white whale is a metaphor for everything. You live for pretentious metaphors.” – Page 59
87 Days Before
16. “Are you okay?”
“I am concussed,” I said.
Takumi sat down with me and looked me in the eye. “Do you know what happened to you?”
“The Beast got me.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“I’m on a triple-and-a-half date.”
“You’re fine,” Takumi said. “Let’s go.” –Page 64
17. “You can fight with me,” I said. I put my controller down and leaned back on our foam couch and was asleep. As I drifted off, I heard the Colonel say, “I can’t be mad at you, you harmless skinny bastard.” – Page 66
84 Days Before
18. “How’ve you been?” I finally asked.
“I’m really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why, or what.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“That’s a what. I’m not doing what’s right now.” – Page 68
58 Days Before
19. “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 to me. “I just did some calculations, and I’ve been able to determine that you’re full of shit.” – Page 78
52 Days Before
20. “I did not hear her words so much as the cadence of her voice. She’d obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me.” – Page 81
21. “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.” –Page 82
49 Days Before
22. “Auden,” she announced. “What ere his last words?”
“Don’t know. Never heard of him.”
“Never heard of him? You poor, illiterate boy. Here, read this line.” I walked over and looked down at her index finger. “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart,” I read aloud. “Yeah. That’s pretty good,” I said.
“Pretty good? Sure, and bufriedos are pretty good. Sex is pretty fun. The sun is pretty hot. Jesus, it says so much about love and brokenness—it’s perfect.”
“Mm-hmm.” I nodded unenthusiastically.
“You’re hopeless. Wanna go porn hunting?”
“Huh?”
“We can’t love our neighbors until we know how crooked their hearts are. Don’t you like porn?” she asked, smiling. – Page 85
23. “All right. The snow may be falling in the winter of my discontent, but at least I’ve got sarcastic company. Sit down, will ya?” – Page 89
44 Days Before
24. “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.” – Page 96
4 Days Before
25. “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.” – Page 100
3 Days Before
26. “Everybody was sitting on sleeping bags, Alaska smoking with flagrant disregard for the overwhelming flammability of the structure, when the Colonel pulled out a single piece of computer paper and read from it.
“The point of this evening’s festivities is to prove once and for all that we are to pranking what the Weekday Warriors are to sucking. But we’ll also have the opportunity to make life unpleasant for the Eagle, which is always a welcome pleasure. And so,” he said, pausing as if for a drumroll, “we fight tonight a battle on three fronts:
“Front One: The pre-prank: We will, as it were, light a fire under the Eagle’s ass.
“Front Two: Operation Baldy: Wherein Lara flies solo in a retaliatory mission so elegant and cruel that it could only have been the brainchild of, well, me.”
“Hey!” Alaska interrupted. “It was my idea.”
“Okay, fine. It was Alaska’s idea.” – Page 103
27. “What the hell is that?”
“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.” – Page 104
2 Days Before
28. “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.” – Page 120
29. “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 maze.” – Page 121
1 Day Before
30. “Pudge, what you must understand about me is that I am a deeply unhappy person.” – Page 124
The Last Day
31. “Truth or Dare!”
“All right,” I agreed, “but I’m not making out with the Colonel.”
The Colonel sat slumped in the corner. “Can’t make out. Too drunk.”
“Dare.”
“Hook up with me.”
So I did.” – Page 130
32. “Christ,” the Colonel said quite loudly. “That wretched beast, drama, draws nigh.” – Page 131
AFTER
The Day After
33. “Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher’s last words were “Now comes the mystery.” The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that’s a record,” before dying. Alaska’s favorite was playwrite Eugene O’Neill: “Born in a hotel room, and—God damn it—died in a hotel room.” Even car-accident victims sometimes had time for last words. Princess Diana said, “Oh God. What’s happened?” Movie star James Dean said, “They’ve got to see us,” just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.” – Page 142
2 Days After
34. “At least it was instant. At least there wasn’t any pain.”
I knew he was only trying to help, but he didn’t get it. There was pain. A dull endless pain in my gut that wouldn’t go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the bathroom, dry-heaving.
And 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.” – Page 146
6 Days After
35. “More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can’t due to deadness, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi’s headrest, and I cried, whimpering, and I didn’t even feel sadness so much as pain. It hurt, and that’s not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.” – Page 151
7 Days After
36. “God. These books she’ll never read. Her Life’s Library.”
“Bought at garage sales and now probably destined for another one.”
“Ashes to ashes. Garage sale to garage sale,” I said.” – Page 154
37. “The places she’s underlined and the little notes she’d written had all been blurred out by the soaking, but the book was still mostly readable, and I was thinking I would take it back to my room and try to read it even though it wasn’t a biography when I flipped to that page, toward the back:
He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the head-long 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!”
The whole passage was underlined in bleeding, water-soaked black ink. But there was another ink, this one a crisp blue, post-flood, and an arrow led from “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!” to a margin note written in her loop-heavy cursive: Straight & Fast.” – Page 155
8 Days After
38. “With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?—A.Y.
“I’m going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,” he said. “Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don’t want us to forget Alaska, and I don’t want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we’re trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers—how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called ‘people’s rotten lots in life.’” – Page 158
20 Days After
39. “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 then 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. I could call everything the Colonel said and 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.” – Page 172
27 Days After
40. “Do you feel drunk?”
“If drunk were cookies, I’d be Famous Amos.”
We laughed. “Chips Ahoy! Would have been funnier,” I said.
“Forgive me. Not at my best.” – Page 179
41. “After fifteen minutes, I handed it to the Colonel. “Blow really hard onto it for at least two seconds,” I said.
He looked up at me. “Is that what you told Lara in the TV room? Because, see, Pudge, they only call it a blow job.”
“Shut up and blow,” I said. – Page 179
29 Days After
42. “I knocked like the Eagle to scare you.” He smiled. “But shit, if y’all need privacy, just leave a note on the door next time.”
Takumi and I laughed, and then Takumi said, “Yeah, Pudge and I were getting a little testy, but man, ever since we showered together, Pudge, I feel really close to you.” – Page 186
43. “I mean,” the Colonel said, “I think she and I were talking about how much I adored skateboarding in the computer but how it would never even occur to me to try and step on a skateboard in real life, and then she said , ‘Let’s play Truth or Dare’ and then you fucked her.”
“Wait, you fucked her? In front of the Colonel?” Takumi cried.
“I didn’t fuck her.”
“Calm down, guys,” the Colonel said, throwing up his hands. “It’s a euphemism.”
“For what?” Takumi asked.
“Kissing.”
“Brilliant Euphemism.” Takumi rolled his eyes.” – Page 187
46 Days After
44. “Funny thing, talking to ghosts,” he said. “You can’t tell if you’re making up their answers or if they are really talking to you.” – Page 193
51 Days After
45. “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.” – Page 196
118 Days After
46. “But we knew what could be found out, and in finding out, she had made us closer—the Colonel and 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.” – Page 212
47. “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.” – Page 213
48. “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 unto 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 much matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.” – Page 214
122 Days After
49. “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.” – Page 216
136 Days After
50. “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.” – Page 218
51. “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.” – Page 218
52. “Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile in 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 manifestation. 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.” – Page 220
53. “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.” – Page 221
Which quote is your favorite?
