My Favorite Quotes

Quotes From 'Looking For Alaska' #4

1. 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 its beautiful.

2. 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.

3. 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 irreparable 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.

4. 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.

5. The times that were the most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly, totally gone she was.

6. She loved mysteries so much, that she became one.

7. I know so many last words but I will never know hers.

8. The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

9. Sinking. Sinking, but instead of feeling panic or anything else, I realized that, "Please guys, don't" were terrible last words. But then the great miracle of the human species - our buoyancy - came through, and as I felt myself floating toward the surface, I twisted and turned as best I could so that the warm night air hit my nose first, and I breathed. I wasn't dead and wasn't going to die.

10. I'd be lying, though, if I claimed that I became a smoker to ward off insects. I became a smoker because 1. I was on an Adirondack swing by myself, and 2. I had cigarettes, and 3. I figured that if everyone else could smoke a cigarette without coughing, I could damn well, too. In short, I didn't have a very good reason. So yeah, let's just say that, 4. It was the bugs.