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In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla.
Sep 18, 2025
Jesus, I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're going to do. I'm just going to do it.
I mean, it’s stupid to miss someone you didn’t even get along with. But I don’t know, it was nice, you know, having someone you could always fight with.
I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life.
That's the mystery, isn't it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape---the world or the end of it?
She left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.
That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.
And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.
Entropy increases. Things fall apart.
She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor.
Why don’t we break up? I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do.
Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.
The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.
I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep... Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was boring and she was endlessly fascinating. 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.
We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.
You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different.
We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions
You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth.
And imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.
But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail
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.
What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant.
When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.
The not knowing would not keep me from caring.
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.
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.
They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing.
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.
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.
At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.
We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations.
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.
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.
We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.
We all use the future to escape the present.
How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!
Suffering is universal. it’s the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.
I'm really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what.
It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.
Damn it, how will I ever get out of this labyrinth?
Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.
I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.
It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?
Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war
What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.
People believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.
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.
She did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think the hate 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.
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.