Looking For Alaska

by John Green

• Things never happened like I imagined them.
• But even in the dark, I could see her eyes - fierce emeralds.
• She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor.
• But there is so much to do: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I'll have more time for reading when I'm old and boring.
• A shared interest in booze and mischief
• When you're walking at night, do you ever get creeped out and even though it's silly and embarrassing you just want to run home?
• How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer?
• But you don't need to like a girl who treats you like you're ten: You've already got a mom.
• Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.
• "I may die young," she said. "But at least I'll die smart. Now, back to tangents."
• 'that which the sea breaks against'
• her eyes on mine like I knew the way out and wouldn't tell her.
• 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 the future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
• Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.
• "The only thing I hate more than rich people," he told me as we walked to the gym, "is stupid people."
• the glittering ambiguity of a girl's smile, which seems to promise an answer to the question but never gives it.
• No woman should ever lie about another woman.
• I really care about her. I mean, we were hopeless. Badly matched. But still, I mean, I said I loved her. 
• I'm a mad guy, Pudge. What do I do with that?
• I suppose we could use some rain.
• It came all at once and in a furious torrent, like God was mad and wanted to flood us out.
• "What happens…to us…when we die?" "Well, something. Maybe."
• Why do good people get rotten lots in life?
• I cupped my hand around my lighter to protect the flame from the slight breeze and lit up.
• "You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart."
• Sure, and bufriedos are pretty good. Sex is pretty fun. The sun is pretty hot.
• 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.
• I don't understand why I screw everything up.
• I don't even trust me.
• I try not to be scared, you know. But I still ruin everything. I still fuck up.
• 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.
• You don't have to care about her, I told myself. Screw her.
• 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.
• We're just, you know, wrecking a little havoc.
• I ran like a cheetah - well, like a cheetah the smoked too much.
• and there was no other way, so we just ran.
• He was trying to lull us into complacency, but it would not work. Tonight, we were invincible.
• we are indefuckingstructible
• I wanted to like booze more than I actually did (which is more or less the precise opposite of how I felt about Alaska). But that night, the booze felt great, as the warmth of the wine in my stomach spread through my body. I didn't like feeling stupid or out of control, but I liked the way it made everything (laughing, crying, peeing in front of your friends) easier.
• it lends excitement to every moment of illicit pleasure.
• Like the way the sun is right now, with the long shadows and that kind of bright soft light you get when the sun isn't quite setting? That's the light that makes everything better, everything prettier, and today, everything just seemed to be in that light.
• 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.
• None of which I said out loud to her. Not then and not ever.
• I am sure that she tasted like stale booze, but I did not notice, and I'm sure I tasted like stale booze and cigarettes, but she did not notice. We were kissing.
• I had never felt another person against me as I slept.
• "Maybe you shouldn't drink so much." "Pudge, what you must understand about me is that I am a deeply unhappy person."
• "Let it out," Alaska said. "You'll be fine."
• 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 eighteen hours out of a possible twenty-four. 
• "Shoot, coward. You are only going to kill a man."
• But a lot of times, people die how they live.
• Zero layers between us. Our tongues dancing back and forth in each other's mouth until there was no her mouth and my mouth but only our mouths intertwined.
• "Less tongue, more lips"

• my mouth tingling and alive as if still kissing
• He would inhale, and then scream. Inhale. Scream. Inhale. Scream.
• There was nothing you could have done.
• her mouth turned up, just enough to suggest the idea of a smile, and she had felt so warm against me, her mouth soft and warm on mine.
• People do not just die.
• This is so fun, but I'm so sleepy. To be continued?
• breathing as if trying to blow air back into the dead.
• All night, I felt paralyzed into silence, terrorized. What was I so afraid of, anyway?
• She was warm and soft against my skin, my tongue in her mouth, and she was laughing, trying to teach me, make me better, promising me to be continued. And now.
• And now she was colder by the hour, more dead with every breath I took. 
• 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 it.
• I feel so screwed up. I feel like I might die.
• At least it was instant. At least there wasn't any pain.
• 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 her weight falls dead on me, crushing my chest, stealing away my breath, and she was cold and wet, like melting ice.
• Yeah. I was so tired of her getting upset for no reason.
• And I just think you ought to have a reason. My girlfriend dumped me, so I'm sad. I got caught smoking, so I'm pissed off. My head hurts, so I'm cranky. She never had a reason.
• I fell asleep listening to his slow, even breaths, his stubbornness finally melting away in the face of insurmountable fatigue. 
• 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 I cried, whimpering, and I didn't even feel sadness so much as pain. It hurt, and that is not euphemism. It hurt like a beating.
• I am not a coward, but I am so strong. So hard to die.
• and I could think of nothing but having killed her.
• I found myself thinking with a bit of pity. No reason to be angry. Anger just distracts from the all-encompassing sadness.
• Getting pissed wouldn't fix it. Damn it.
• but the smell, unmistakably her, shocked me.
• the smell faded as I became accustomed to it, and soon she was gone again.
• that she and I had shared that alone, and i kept it for myself like a keepsake, as if sharing the memory might lead  to its dissipation.
• The rest was darkness
• the distance between us unbridgeable
• I was busy trying to get the a last hints of her smell
• "You reek of smoke, Pudge." "Ask me if I give a shit."
• How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering 
• At some point, we all look up and realized are lost in a maze
• And if I had cared about her as I should have, as I thought I did, how could I ever let there go
• and I just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep until the time came to do it all over again
• I had wondered. I had wondered if she had any intention of keeping her promise that we would be continued.
• But I'd rather wonder than get answers I couldn't live with. 
• I don't know, I really don't want to know.
• the night falling fast and early
• Expression of hopelessness and anger at oneself and/or the world
• Maybe she just had an odd kind of courage that I lacked, but no.
• From fire and brimstone to smoke and ashes
• The point is that there are always answers, Pudge
• There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.
• God, people like that shouldn't be allowed to live.
• It was not enough to be the last guy she kissed. I wanted to be the last one she loved.
• I hated her for not caring about me
• She would have just lain with me and talked and cried, and I would have listened and kissed at her tears as they pooled in her eyes.
• I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska
• remembering only after having forgotten.
• She taught me everything I knew. She made me different
• You can't just make me different and then leave, and you can't just make me different and then die.
• she had proven to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps.
• I could try to pretend I didn't care anymore, but it would never be the same 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.
• I can't remember, because I never knew.
• "Do you feel drunk?" "If drunk were cookies, I'd be Famous Amos."
• I feel awesome right now, because I'm still drunk.
• but I didn't really care much anymore
• Everything's a maybe, isn't it?
• don't tell me anything that not relevant I don't want to know anything unless it's going to help me know where she was going and why
• "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."
• there is no best and no worst, that those judgments have no real meaning because there is only what is
• Everything that comes together falls apart
• The cells and organs and stems that make you you - they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart.
• because nothing can last, not even the earth itself
• When you stopped wishing rings wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.
• 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.
• and that which had come together commenced to fall apart
• We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved.
• It was genuinely hot out again, warm like she was. And I felt okay.
• 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 the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.
• 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.
• Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled.
• But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter.
• we are greater than the sum of our parts
• 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. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change sizes and shapes and manifestations.

• Most loves don't last. But some do.