My Favorite Quotes from Looking for Alaska

I've spent the last two days reading this book whenever possible, being essentially unable to put it down. Looking for Alaska by John Green is not a book you read, so much as experience. 

This book caused me to think and feel things that no book ever has before, as it is so damn realistic. 

I have not as of yet recovered emotionally from the book enough to write a review, but that will hopefully be coming within the week. For now, I leave you with a list of my favorite quotes from the novel, the ones that inspired me and the ones that made me think and the ones that made me cry:

1. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it? - Page 32

2. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia...you spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you will 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 55

3. Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. 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 a hurricane. - Page 88

4. 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

5. 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. - Page 144

***SPOILERS TO THE PLOT AHEAD***

6. And what is an "instant" death anyways? 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

7. "You can't just make me different and then leave...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 proven 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. You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different. - Page 172

8. Everything that comes together falls 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. - Page 196

9. We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffer go when they did. - Page 196

10. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and 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

11. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts.... There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.... We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. - Page 220/221

12. 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

If anyone has other quotes from Looking for Alaska that meant something to them, please share them with me! I would also love to hear other peoples' opinions on this novel.

Until next time, thanks for reading!