I liked Fault in our stars but many people recommended me to read the book, at that time I wasn’t a regular reader and it felt pointless to read after watching the movie. Plus for a long time, I didn’t know that John Green of the book is same as the awesome guy who hosts CrashCourse. I wanted to start off with his first book.
Summary
The book is a coming of age story of Miles who moves to a boarding school. Miles goes from a shy introverted kid to forming a gang in high school. It is here that he meets Alaska a bibliophile and a prank-loving rebel, a crush-at-first-sight. The rest of the story is about gang’s activities, teenage love and parts of their history and consequences of their actions that the characters have to face.
At the heart of the story is suffering and how one must learn to forgive oneself. The book is heavily influenced by Marquez’s The general in his labyrinth and Francois Rabelais. The last few pages are a lot to handle emotionally, it hits you where it hurts. A feeling of emptiness after reading a book is always present, this one leaves you with a thought which one has to ponder about.
Quotes
I go 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. –Rabelais last words
How will I get out of this labyrinth — Simon Bolivar’s last words
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.
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.
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.
If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest action.s But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.
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 a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.
That which came together will fall apart slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her forgetting me and everyone else but herself in those last moments
We are as indestructable as we believe ourselves to be.
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
Takeaway
We punish ourselves due to our mistakes, some things aren’t in our control and even when they are sometimes we err. One must first be kind to oneself. Carrying the guilt can be emotionally painful.
iamonlyhuman 