The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

I've always believed that a person is smart. It's people that are stupid.

Most of the world's problems could be avoided if people just said what they fucking meant.

Relationships never break cleanly. Like a valuable vase, they are smashed and then glued back together, smashed and glued, smashed and glued until the pieces just don't fit together anymore.

Not only are love and hate such closely related emotions, but it's a lot easier to hate someone you've cared about than someone you never have.

I walked away exhilarated by my success, because there's nothing like making a difference in someone's life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills.

The crack inside your fucking heart is me.

I've seen my own death in dreams like this and it's helped me appreciate life more. I've also seen my own life in dreams and it's helped me appreciate death more.

The seeds of who I am now had been planted. "Fools aren't born," I wrote in my notebook one day during ethics class. "They are watered and grown like weeds by institutions such as Christianity.

Gradually, I began to resent Christian school and doubt everything I was told. It became clear that the suffering they were praying to be released from was a suffering they had imposed on themselves—and now us. The beast they lived in fear of was really themselves: It was man, not some mythological demon, that was going to destroy man in the end. And this beast had been created out of their fear.

This is the culture your raising your kids in, don't be suprised when it blows up in your face.

This question is posed to mayself, am I a man who thinks he's an angel? Or an angel who thinks he's a man?

If every cigarette you smoke takes seven minutes off of your life, every game of Dungeons & Dragons you play delays the loss of your virginity by seven hours.

I was becoming the cold, emotionally crippled monster I always wanted to be, and I wasn’t so sure I liked it. But it was too late. The metamorphosis was already well under way.

There's nothing like the feeling of knowing that you've made a difference in someone's life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills.

As a performer, I wanted to be the loudest, most persistent alarm clock I could be, because there didn’t seem like any other way to snap society out of its Christianity- and media-induced coma.

I spent hours flipping through the stations, watching Pat Robertson preach about society’s evils and then ask people to call him with their credit card number.

If you act like a rock star you will be treated like one.

The balance between good and evil, and the choices we make between them, are probably the single most important aspects of shaping our personalities and humanity.

[...] no one had lived up to the roles they acted out in public. They wasted their years trying to live the lies that they had created for themselves. Only in private could they really be the demons, hypocrites and sinners they really were, and woe betide anyone who caught them at their game, because the only thing worse than a lie is a lie exposed.

Occasionally, something will happen that will change your opinion of someone irrevocably, that will shatter the ideal you’ve built up around a person and force you to see them for the fallible and human creature they really are.

I was very apprehensive, mostly because I didn’t want to get caught. By now, I had begun to feel removed from the everyday world of morality. Guilt had become more a fear of getting caught than any sense of right or wrong.

[...] morals are worn as a badge to make you look good and [...] it's so much easier to talk about your beliefs than to live up to them

everybody has a light and a dark side, and neither can exist without the other.

I’ve always been paranoid about the police, because even when I’m not doing anything illegal I’m thinking about doing something illegal.

[...] extremes—whether good or bad—don't fit into society's definition of normality

In the Bible, the word antichrist is only used as a description of people who don’t believe in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. He is not described as one satanic entity—as the beast of Revelation which many people believe—but as a person, any person, who deviates from the Christian orthodoxy. But through years of myth-making and fear-sowing, Christianity metamorphosed antichrists into a single Antichrist, an apocalyptic villain and Christian bogeyman used to scare people much as Santa Claus is used to regulate children’s behavior.

The apocalypse doesn’t have to be fire and brimstone. It could happen on a personal level. If you believe you’re the center of your own universe and you want to see the universe destroyed, it only takes one bullet.

People don’t keep journals for themselves. They keep them for other people, like a secret they don’t want to tell but they want everyone to know.

The key to changing the way people think is to change what’s popular. That’s why rather than submit to the mainstream, you have to become it—and then overcome it.

Anyone I may have used should feel happy that they even had a use. It's better than being useless.