Looking for Alaska

Note:  Another lit. post!  Thank you so much for the awesome response to the Wallflower one.


LOOKING FOR ALASKA


Another must-read for every teenager, John Green's story of a boy named Miles and a girl named Alaska is heart-wrenching, touching...  simply amazing.  


Some Favorite Quotes (some spoilers):
"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." 
"The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive." 
"You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them."
"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." 
"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." 
"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." 
"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. And as I walked back to give Takumi’s note to the Colonel, I saw that I would never know. I would never know her well enough to know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if she left us on purpose. 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." 
"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." 
"When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books." 
"At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved." 
"I may die young, but at least I'll die smart." 
"I try to live life so that I can live with myself." 
"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." 
"And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart." 
"I was born into Bolívar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps." 


Too put it simply:  you should read it.