B. Looking for Alaska

Looking for Alaska

Highlights

Because you may be smart, but I’ve been smart longer. — location: 559

I must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. 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?” — location: 561

I hated discussion classes. I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn’t sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it. — location: 565

surreptitiously. — location: 630

deadpanned, — location: 728

“Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.” — location: 745

I didn’t hate him like the Colonel did, of course, because the Colonel hated him on principle, and principled hate is a hell of a lot stronger than “Boy, I wish you hadn’t mummified me and thrown me into the lake” hate. — location: 785

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.” — location: 892

“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.” — location: 894

I had imagined that life at the Creek would be a bit more exciting than it was—in reality, there’d been more homework than adventure—but if I hadn’t imagined it, I would never have gotten to the Creek at all. — location: 896

“Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.” — location: 924

meted — location: 927

ostensibly — location: 1015

glib, — location: 1060

It came all at once and in a furious torrent, like God was mad and wanted to flood us out. — location: 1092

What’s your most important question?” After thirty seconds of running, I was already winded. “What happens…to us…when we die?” — location: 1139

“the sound is an integral part of the artistic experience of this video game. Muting Decapitation would be like reading only every other word of Jane Eyre. — location: 1204

I didn’t know whether to trust Alaska, and I’d certainly had enough of her unpredictability—cold one day, sweet the next; irresistibly flirty one moment, resistibly obnoxious the next. I preferred the Colonel: At least when he was cranky, he had a reason. — location: 1209

“Hey.” Then, when she did not turn to me, I screamed, “Alaska!” She walked over. “I was looking for you,” she said, joining me on the rock. — location: 1276

“I’m just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them.” — location: 1282

“It’s not life or death, the labyrinth.” — location: 1315

“Suffering,” she said. “Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That’s the problem. Bolívar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you — location: 1316

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. — location: 1410

“Best Waffle House in Alabama.” The Colonel smiled, and then I realized, he wasn’t embarrassed of his mom at all. He was just scared that we would act like condescending boarding-school snobs. I’d always found the Colonel’s I-hate-the-rich routine a little overwrought until I saw him with his mom. He was the same Colonel, but in a totally different context. It made me hope that one day, I could meet Alaska’s family, too. — location: 1467

precipitously — location: 1494

purportedly — location: 1529

I wish I could say I was in it for the thrill of learning, but mostly I was in it for the thrill of getting into a worthwhile college. — location: 1532

That’s a funny thing about parents. Even though I pretty much stayed at the Creek over Thanksgiving because I wanted to, my parents still felt guilty. It’s nice to have people who will feel guilty for you, — location: 1535

I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to. — location: 1592

Talk about a guy who could use a wife. — location: 1598

The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible. The plan may have had faults, but we did not. — location: 1640

Why did we drink? For me, it was just fun, particularly since we were risking expulsion. The nice thing about the constant threat of expulsion at Culver Creek is that it lends excitement to every moment of illicit pleasure. The bad thing, of course, is that there is always the possibility of actual expulsion. — location: 1758

we spent the day hiding out, but loudly. Hiding out loud. — location: 1765

I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and toward the end, his wife started crying and screaming, “I want to go, too! I want to go, too!” And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: “We are all going.” — location: 1890

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. — location: 1900

“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. — location: 1904

“Pudge.” She shook her head and sipped the cold coffee and wine. “Pudge, what you must understand about me is that I am a deeply unhappy person.” — location: 1947

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. — location: 1960

accentuation. — location: 1970

“But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about. — location: 2020

I know so many last words. But I will never know hers. — location: 2174

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. — location: 2199

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel so screwed up. I feel like I might die.” “You might,” I said. “Yeah. Yeah. I might. You never know. It’s just. It’s like. POOF. And you’re gone.” — location: 2220

I didn’t know what to say to her—I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side. — location: 2241

He had to come back for the funeral, because I could not go alone, and going with anyone other than the Colonel would amount to alone. — location: 2256

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, — location: 2296

and I didn’t even feel sadness so much as pain. It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating. — location: 2298

and it was just the three of us—three bodies and two people—the three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us, too much keeping us from one another. — location: 2314

With one hand, he picked at one of the last remaining pieces of blue vinyl on our foam couch. — location: 2331

She flooded into my present, and only tact kept me from burying my face in the dirty laundry overfilling the hamper by her dresser. — location: 2341

“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. — location: 2347

and I kept it for myself like a keepsake, as if sharing the memory might lead to its dissipation. — location: 2358

He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong 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!” — location: 2365

“How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!” to a margin note written in her loop-heavy cursive: Straight & Fast. — location: 2368

But more than the noiselessness of everyone else was the silence where she should have been, the bubbling bursting storytelling Alaska, but instead it felt like those times when she had withdrawn into herself, like she was refusing to answer how or why questions, only this time for good. — location: 2395

bemoan — location: 2424

“I don’t want to talk to Jake,” I said halfheartedly, — location: 2452

careening — location: 2509

Screw this, I thought, and for the first time, I imagined just going back home, ditching the Great Perhaps for the old comforts of school friends. Whatever their faults, I’d never known my school friends in Florida to die on me. — location: 2515

Wait, are you?” “No,” I said. And maybe it was only because Alaska couldn’t hit the brakes and I couldn’t hit the accelerator. Maybe she just had an odd kind of courage that I lacked, but no. — location: 2543

“The point is that there are always answers, Pudge.” — location: 2558

stoically, — location: 2561

“God, people like that shouldn’t be allowed to live,” he said after she left. — location: 2572

It was not enough to be the last guy she kissed. I wanted to be the last one she loved. — location: 2609

She made me different. I lit a cigarette and spit into the creek. “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. — location: 2622

You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don’t even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. — location: 2627

“Do you know how you’re going to die?” The merchant answered, “No. No one knows how they’re going to die.” And the Sufi said, “I do.” — location: 2640

“How?” asked the merchant. And the Sufi lay down, crossed his arms, said, “Like this,” and died, — location: 2641

I couldn’t honestly imagine her as anything but dead, her body rotting in Vine Station, the rest of her just a ghost alive only in our remembering. — location: 2654

Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die. — location: 2859

I wanted to want to talk to her. I knew I’d been awful—Imagine, I kept telling myself, if you were Lara, with a dead friend and a silent ex-boyfriend—but I only had room for one true want, and she was dead, and I wanted to know the how and why of it, and Lara couldn’t tell me, and that was all that mattered. — location: 2882

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. — location: 2898

purported — location: 2901

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. — location: 2990

When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did. Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. — location: 2992

Because memories fall apart, too. And then you’re left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. — location: 2994

soliloquy — location: 3016

linoleum. — location: 3024

minutiae — location: 3053

aplomb — location: 3150

But we knew what could be found out, and in finding it 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. — location: 3231

We met and I held him, my hands balled into 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. — location: 3255

“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.” — location: 3295

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. — location: 3320

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. — location: 3326

and I wrote my way out of the labyrinth: — location: 3328

so I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life. — location: 3331

she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it in spite of having lost her. — location: 3333

I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe “the afterlife” is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled. — location: 3342

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. — location: 3344

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. — location: 3346

she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. 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 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. So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. 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. — location: 3350

amalgams — location: 3398