Claire > Claire's Quotes

“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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting.”
― 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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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 towards 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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Have you really read all those books in your room?”

Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life..”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Scared isn't a good excuse. Scared is the excuse everyone has always used.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I can't be mad at you, you harmless scrawny bastard.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I'd rather wonder than get answers I couldn't live with.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“No woman should ever lie about another woman. You've violated the sacred covenant between women! How will stabbing one another in the back help women to rise above patriarchal oppression?”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“A woman so strong she burns heaven and drenches hell.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“When you stop wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you stop suffering when they do.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“The phrase booze and mischief left me worrying I'd stumbled into what my mother referred to as "the wrong crowd," but for the wrong crowd, they both seemed awfully smart.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I thought at first she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her alot like that, like someone's meal. What was her - green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs - would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, I think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make the time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled.
But ultimately I do not believe that she was just matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. 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.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Jane, my little darling (so I will call you, for so you are), you don't know what you are talking about; you misjudge me again: it is not because she is mad I hate her. If you were mad, do you think I should hate you?"

"I do indeed, sir."

"Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat--your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Am I hideous, Jane?
Very, sir: you always were, you know.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“What matters to you defines your mattering.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“If people could see me the way I see myself - if they could live in my memories - would anyone love me?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“Well, while you were in the bathroom, I sat down at this picnic table here in Bumblefug, Kentucky, and noticed that someone had carved that GOD HATES FAG, which, aside from being a grammatical nightmare, is absolutely ridiculous. So I'm changing it to 'God Hates Baguettes.' It's tough to disagree with that. Everybody hates baguettes.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines