Chuck Palahniuk · 302 pages
Rating: (104.2K votes)
“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”
“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
“No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.”
“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
“Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.”
“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”
“Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.”
“No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.”
“We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”
“You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.”
“Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong.”
“Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.”
“The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.”
“If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.”
“Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.”
“Fuck me. I'm so tired of being me. Me beautiful. Me ugly. Blonde. Brunette. A million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me.
Who I was before the accident is just a story now. Everything before now, before now, before now, is just a story I carry around. I guess that would apply to anybody in the world. What I need is a new story about who I am.
What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself.”
“Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.”
“The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.”
“The idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.”
“I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this long long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it's just about getting off. Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love.”
“It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.”
“Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”
“People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.”
“Give me lust, baby.
Flash.
Give me malice.
Flash.
Give me detached existentialist ennui.
Flash.
Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
Flash.”
“I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.”
“Make me into anything, but just love me.”
“Find good in what the world says is evil.”
“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
“I want you to stay with me,” he said. “And that’s the problem. Every time you leave me, I need you a little bit more.”
“If you didn't feel like your support system was strong enough, then getting yourself out of the situation was the best thing to do”
“Normally Halloween was like Christmas for me. I would anticipate it for weeks, decorating myself and the house, as well as strolling around the neighborhood, admiring everyone else's decorations. Nothing lifts my spirit like a scarecrow in the front yard.”
“The Western world, he believed, was afflicted by the curse of short-term thinking, the inevitable result of democracy.”
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