50 Great Words from Looking for Alaska, by John Green

She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor.

He got through the A's before looking up and noticing my incredulous stare.

It was an indulgence, learning last words.

I'm not going to be your entree to

And the first thing I thought was Okay, how do I extricate this claw from my boob before it leaves permanent marks? and the second thing I thought was God, I can't wait to tell Takumi and the Colonel."

"Yeah, but he doesn't really go into blitzkrieg mode until classes start," Chip said nonchalantly.

I mean, I hate the rich snots here with a fervent passion I usually reserve only for dental work and my
father.

In that first week at the Creek, the cafeteria served fried chicken, chicken-fried steak, and fried okra, which marked my first foray into the delicacy that is the fried vegetable.

"Much to my chagrin, that is an incontestable fact.

And the way her mouth curled up on the right side all the time, like she was preparing to smirk, like she'd mastered the right
half of the Mona Lisa's inimitable smile...

His audible, almost desperate breaths reminded me of my grandfather when he was dying of lung cancer.

You antagonize them!"

On both sides of the phone, dozens of phone numbers and esoteric notes were written in pen and marker
(205.555.1584;

"For fifty minutes a day, five days a week, you abide by my rules.

After perhaps two minutes of combing through a clover patch with her long, dirty fingernails, Alaska grabbed a clover with three full-size petals and an undersize, runt of a fourth, then looked up at me, barely giving me time to avert my eyes.

The Colonel ran up to Alaska, and they started fighting about something quietly enough that I couldn't hear the words so much as the mutual annoyance, and I finally asked Takumi where we were headed.

"He has no right to condescend to us is all I'm saying," Alaska said, continuing her conversation with the Colonel.

"Pudge is done with staring out the window, and I'm done with going on tirades about it, but he's a terrible teacher, and you won't convince me otherwise."

"Yeah, Pudge is adorable / but you want incorrigible / so Jake is more endurable / 'cause he's so—
damn.

"Drop a beat, Colonel Catastrophe," Takumi said, and I laughed at the idea that a guy as short and dorky as the

I made friends all right—with a bunch of kindergartners, which didn't really bolster my social standing with my peers.

If he does, you spend the rest of your life lamenting the day you pissed in my shoes."

And all sarcastic, Fillmore said, 'The nourishment is palatable,' and then died.

We were playing some Christian school from downtown Birmingham, a team stocked with huge, gargantuan apemen with thick
beards and a strong distaste for turning the othercheek.

Before we even got off campus, Lara was lurching helplessly whenever Alaska took hard turns, so I
took Alaska's advice and wrapped my arms around Lara's waist.

Culver Creek students, the TV room had the musty air of dust and mildew—and, perhaps for that reason, was
almost perennially unoccupied.

As she talked, she bobbed her head back and forth to the MTV music, even though the song was the kind of manufactured pop ballad she professed to hate.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia."

The Colonel blew smoke rings, and Takumi called them "pretentious," while Alaska followed the smoke rings with her fingers, stabbing at
them like a kid trying to pop bubbles.

The Eagle wheeled around, his sixth sense detecting Insubordination To Authority Figures.

If I were you, I'd sit down, look cute, and be your pleasantly aloof self."

I wanted to hate Jake, of course, but as I watched them together, smiling and fumbling all over each other, I
didn't hate him.

I wanted to be him, sure, but I tried to remember I was ostensibly on a date with someone else.

And I vaguely remember Lara smiling at me from the doorway, the glittering ambiguity of a girl's smile, which seems to promise an answer to
the question but never gives it.

You can check if you'd like,' and Sara thought I was being too glib, I suppose, because then she said she knew for a fact I'd hooked up with Alaska.

How will stabbing one another in the back help women to rise above patriarchal oppression?!'

I mean, I knew it was inevitable.

And as the Colonel and I walked over the parched, half-dead grass that Monday, I said, "I suppose we could use some rain," and the Colonel looked up at the low clouds coming in fast and threatening, and then he said, "Well, use it or not, we're sure as shit going to get some."

It came all at once and in a furious torrent, like God was mad and wanted to flood us out.

By the third day, I abandoned my umbrella entirely and walked around in a perpetual state of wetness.

Emperor Augustus on them, and that beneath his picture were inscribed the words Filius Dei.

And that's pretty ingenious, to divert water from the gutter to her room.

She coaxed me onto the couch, and we played Decapitation together until she abruptly dropped the controller.

...after I joined Alaska on a harrowing, we-don't-need-no-stinking-brakes drive to the
airport to drop off Takumi; and after the campus settled into an eerie quiet, with no doors
slamming and no music playing and no one laughing and no one screaming; after all that:

I did not hear her words so much as the cadence of her voice.

"Look at this," she said, and I saw that it was half filled with a brackish, brown liquid.

Alaska went in alone and walked out the door five minutes later weighed down by two paper bags filled with
contraband: three cartons of cigarettes, five bottles of wine, and a fifth of vodka for the Colonel.

What we need is a pre-prank that coincides with an attack on Kevin and
his minions," she said.

I spent an inordinate amount of time studying for finals, which helped my GPA considerably.

We walked on the dirt road over the bridge and back to the school's barn, a dilapidated leak-prone structure that
looked more like a
long-abandoned log cabin than a barn.