John Green, Looking for Alaska

"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."

"That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape 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."

"Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning,' and Isben looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he died."

"I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness."

"I just did some calculations and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit."

"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."

"And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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?"

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