SPOILER ALERT SPOILERSSPOILERS DON'T READ THIS LIST IF YOU HAVEN'T READ/PLAN ON READING THIS BOOK

• "I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. 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 hopelessly 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."
• "She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor."
• "She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry- she made me different."
• "And now she was colder by the hour, more dead with every breath I took. I thought: That is 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 maybe it was only because Alaska couldn't hit the brakes and I couldn't hit the accelerator. Maybe she just had an odd kind of courage that I lacked..."
• "'Funny thing about talking to ghosts,' he said. 'You can't tell if you're making up their answers or if they are really talking to you."
• "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."
• "...I thought, God, we must look so lame, but it doesn't matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive."
• "But we can't know better until knowing better is useless."
• "...Ultimately I do not believe that she was only 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. Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself--those are awful things, but 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 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. So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. 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."