Looking for Alaska

9/13/13




  • I go to seek a Great Perhaps.
  • The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended only by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people.
  • Because you simply cannot draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.
  • But while you were looking out the window, you missed the chance to explore the equally interesting Buddhist belief in being present for every facet of your daily life, of being truly present.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.
  • It's stupid to miss someone you didn't even get along with. But, I don't know, it was nice, you know, having someone you could always fight with.
  • I'm really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what.
  • What is the most important question human beings must answer?
  • Night falls fast. Today is in the past.
  • And what is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is is one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.
  • I was so tired of her getting upset for no reason. The way she would get sulky and make references to the freaking oppressive weight of tragedy or whatever but then never said what was wrong, never have any goddamned reason to be sad. 
  • She never had a reason. I was just tired of putting up with her drama. And I just let her go.
  • Her moodiness had annoyed me, too, sometimes, but not that night. That night I let her go because she told me to. It was that simple for me, and that stupid.
  • 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. 
  • How will I ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?
  • Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.
  • I'd rather wonder than get answers I couldn't live with.
  • 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 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 suffering when they did.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied only by the last words of the already dead.
  • 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.
  • Energy is never created and never destroyed.
  • 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.