John Green

“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.”

“Francois Rabelais. He was this poet. And his last words were 'I go to seek a Great Perhaps.'

"Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him,

'You seem to be feeling better this morning/ and Ibsen looked at her and said, Òn the contrary,' and

then he died."

“JFK,” she said.

“That's obvious,” I answered.

“Oh, is it now?” she asked.

“No. Those were his last words. Someone said, `Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love

you,' and then he said, 'That's obvious,' and then he got shot.”

"When Fillmore was dying, he was super hungry. But his doctor was trying to starve his fever or

whatever.

Fillmore wouldn't shut up about wanting to eat, though, so finally the doctor gave him a tiny teaspoon of soup.

And all sarcastic, Fillmore said, 'The nourishment is palatable,' and then died. No truce."

The final exam: What is the most important question human beings must answer? Choose your question wisely, and then examine how Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity attempt to answer it

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.

I still maintain that Rabelais' last words were “I go to seek a Great Perhaps,”

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."

maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable.