John Green, Looking for Alaska

"I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God."

"What the hell is that?"I laughed."It's my fox hat.""Your fox hat?""Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat.""Why are you wearing your fox hat?"I asked."Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox."

"When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books."

"I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn't hate people who watched or played them."

"At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze."

"It is worth it to leave behing my minor life for grander maybes-Miles "Pudge"

"It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations."

"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."

"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."

"You can't just make me different and then leave"

"Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps."That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps."

"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."

"Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die."

"I may die young, but at least I'll die smart."

"You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. 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. And so I never knew you, did I? I can't remember, because I never knew."

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

"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."

"She's cute, I thought, but you don't need to like a girl who treats you like you're ten: You've already got a mom."

"What the hell is that?"I laughed."It's my fox hat.""Your fox hat?""Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat.""Why are you wearing your fox hat?"I asked."Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox."

"It's not because I want to make out with her."Hold on."He grabbed a pencil and scrawled excitedly at the paper as if he'd just made a mathematical breakthrough and then looked back up at me. "I just did some calculations, and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit"