Beam Me Up, Scotty!: A popular quotation from the book is "The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive". This isn't present verbatim in the novel; it was probably paraphrased into a more quotable form from a sentence found near the last chapter.
"He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth."
Troubled Production: Plagued the film adaptation of the book for the over 10 years since it originally came out (see main page).
What Could Have Been: The tenth anniversary edition includes excerpts from the very first draft, revealing a number of differences from the finished product:
The first draft was titled Misremembering Alaska.
Pudge was initially written to be a disaffected Deadpan Snarker, with a coarser, more cynical attitude.
The Colonel was originally written to be attracted to Alaska alongside Pudge.
The novel featured the motif of a discarded cicada skin gifted to Pudge from his mother, which was inspired by a real gift Green received as a teenager.
The funeral scene took the longest to get right; originally, Pudge never even attends. Later iterations featured Alaska's burial which was eventually cut.
Instead of the symmetrical before/after structure, the novel originally jumped to different out-of-order time periods every chapter, (500) Days of Summer-style, because of, in John's words, "important literary reasons." He's now embarrassed about this.
Write What You Know: The Culver Creek Preparatory School was closely based on the real life Indian Springs School (Birmingham, Alabama), a boarding school John Green attended. The Bufriedos were real, and they were even less healthy than the book made them sound.