Looking for Alaska is a book written by John Green that tells the story of teenage love stories. Even so, the story in the book is not a petty love story. You also can find pretty deep quotes inside this book.
Looking for Alaska tells the story of Miles Halter who started his school at Culver Creek, a preparatory school that was also facilitated with a dormitory. There he also had to live in a room with Chip Martin.
Table of Contents
What is Looking for Alaska Talk About
Miles and Chip will both live a fiery teenage life. Moreover, they will be a group with Takumi, Lara, and of course Alaska.
The focus of this novel is centered on the lives of the five teenagers. This book tells about the live of those who are often associated with delinquency.
Looking for Alaska takes the perspective of one of the characters in the book, Miles. The guy is quite a lot, revealed from various thoughts in this book. Miles at Culver Creek finally had friends, after he had always been alone.
Although the theme is teenagers, Looking for Alaska does not necessarily show a superficial conflict. Especially with the excavation of each character, which in my opinion is quite heavy.
Some readers might ask, where is the story in the Looking for Alaska book. Even until the middle part of the book, some readers may not have guessed it. But in the middle of the book to the end, this book only shows its main conflict.
In this book there are two large sections that are named BEFORE and AFTER, each section contains a contrasting storyline.
More or less BEFORE section telling about exciting activities carried out by five friends.
While the AFTER section contains stories that are in line with the title of this book ‘LOOKING FOR ALASKA’ aka search for Alaska. Where is Alaska? How come it must be searched? Hehe, more details, please read this book. You could say I prefer the AFTER part of this novel.
Why You Should Read Looking for Alaska
Like other novels, this novel also has pluses and minuses. When you read this book, you will get a lot of knowledge related to the life and psychology of teenager.
I think John Green is able to present a complex teen story but many colorful things that he tried to tuck and he managed to blend it with the main story. Looking for Alaska, makes my perspective on the story of adolescence more open, that the more teenagers are obsessed with the desires of their youth, he must quickly be aware of the consequences of that.
I recommend this novel, especially for those who have not read the work of this one writer. Well, I became interested in reading other works from John Green, especially the legendary The Fault in Our Stars, and of course Will Grayson Will Grayson written duet with David Levithan.
Looking for Alaska Quotes
Looking for Alaska Quotes about Friendship
And if the Colonel thought that calling me his friend would make me stand by him, well, he was right.
When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books
The five of us walking confidently in a row, I’d never felt cooler. The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible. The plan may have had faults, but we did not.
Her funeral Sunday. I wondered if the Colonel would get back by then, where he was. He had to come back for the funeral, because I could not go alone, and going with anyone other than the Colonel would amount to alone.
I may have kissed her, but I really didn’t have a monopoly on Alaska; the Colonel and I weren’t the only ones who cared about her, and weren’t alone in trying to figure out how she died and why.
But we knew what could be found out, and in finding it out, she had made us closer—the Colonel and Takumi and me, anyway.
And then I screwed up and the Colonel screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And there’s no sugarcoating it: She deserved better friends.
Looking for Alaska Quotes about Life
Francois Rabelais. He was this 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.
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.
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 here?
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.
But even so, the afterlife mattered to me. Heaven and hell and reincarnation. As much as I wanted to know how Alaska had died, I wanted to know where she was now, if anywhere. I liked to imagine her looking down on us, still aware of us, but it seemed like a fantasy, and I never really felt it—just as the Colonel had said at the funeral that she wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. I couldn’t honestly imagine her as anything but dead, her body rotting in Vine Station, the rest of her just a ghost alive only in our remembering.
I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering. In China, the Old Man had told us, there are days reserved for grave cleaning, where you make gifts to the dead. And I imagined that Alaska would want a smoke, and so it seemed to me that the Colonel had begun an excellent ritual.
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.
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.
I may die young, but at least I’ll die smart.
Interesting Fact about Looking for Alaska
Looking for Alaska is pretty close based on real life of the writer. The author, John Green also go to a boarding school. A classmate of him, died, and the death devastated the school, just like the story on book. Other than that, there really was a prank at John Green’s boarding school that involved a stripper and Speaker Day.