May 23, 2012 • 8 notes
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.
Looking for Alaska, John Green
May 23, 2012 • 10 notes
We are greater than the sum of our parts.
Looking for Alaska, John Green
May 23, 2012 • 3 notes
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.
Looking For Alaska, John Green
May 23, 2012 • 2 notes
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.
Looking for Alaska, John Green
May 23, 2012 • 6 notes
When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did.
Looking for Alaska, John Green
May 23, 2012 • 1 note
Dr.Hyde: 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.
Looking for Alaska, John Green
May 23, 2012
I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.
Looking for Alaska, John Green
May 23, 2012 • 5 notes
Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die.
Looking for Alaska, John Green
May 23, 2012
Colonel: If drunk were cookies, I’d be Famous Amos.
Looking for Alaska, John Green
May 23, 2012
I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them?
Looking for Alaska, John Green