“You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies — which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world — what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.”
— Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
5:08 pm • 7 April 2013
“We’re not afraid to grow close to each other here. Our friendships take root and bloom. […] There’s no one around to stifle us. No one to tell us that what we think and feel is wrong. It isn’t that we do what we want. It’s that we’re allowed to want at all.”
— Gemma Doyle, Rebel Angels by Libba Bray
(Source: ffullmoonphobic)
10:50 pm • 1 February 2013 • 9 notes
“[…] 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.”
— Miles “Pudge” Halter, Looking For Alaska by John Green
4:19 pm • 28 January 2013 • 3 notes
“But why Alaska?” I asked her.
She smiled with the right side of her mouth. “Well, later, I found out what it means. It’s from an Aleut word, Alyeska. It means ‘that which the sea breaks against,’ and I love that. But at the time, I just saw Alaska up there. And it was big, just like I wanted to be. And it was damn far away from Vine Station, Alabama, just like I wanted to be.”
— Looking for Alaska by John Green
10:40 pm • 10 January 2013 • 20 notes
“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.”
— Miles “Pudge” Halter, Looking for Alaska by John Green
10:24 pm • 10 January 2013 • 21 notes
“She must have come to feel so powerless, I thought, that the one thing she might have done […] never even occurred to her. 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.”
— Miles “Pudge” Halter, Looking for Alaska by John Green
10:11 pm • 10 January 2013 • 3 notes
“Linda: Well, dear, life is a casting off. It’s always that way.
Willy: No, no, some people—some people accomplish something.”
— Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
11:06 pm • 16 December 2012 • 3 notes
“But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass— our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. […] But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we’re all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. […] I like the strings, I always have. Because that’s how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is, I think. We’re not as frail as the strings would make us believe. […] Maybe it’s more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel, and these things happen— these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. […] But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. […] But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”
— Quentin “Q” Jacobsen, Paper Towns by John Green
2:07 am • 22 November 2012 • 18 notes
