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I Hate How On Tv They Have To Fill So Many Minutes. It Means They Have To Put In Anything, And By Doing So They Sort Of Trivialize News; News Becomes This Commodity That They Need To Fill Dead Time Between Commercials With.

-Chuck Palahniuk

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I Hate How On

Chuck Palahniuk

...

I Hate How On Tv They Have To Fill So Many Minutes. It Means They Have To Put In Anything, And By Doing So They Sort Of Trivialize News; News Becomes This Commodity That They Need To Fill Dead Time Between Commercials With.

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Where I'm Is One Of Those Stair Climbing Machines The Agent Has Installed. You Climb And Climb Forever And Never Get Off The Ground. You're Trapped In Your Hotel Room. It's The Mystical Sweat Love Lodge Experience Of Our Time, The Only Sort Of Indian Vision Quest We Can Schedule Into Our Daily Planner.our Stair Master To Heaven.

All Object Printed: Love Me. Look Me. Million Speaking Objects,begging. Crown American Consumer With Power Of King, To Rescue Choose And Give Home Or Abandon Here For Expire.

The Laws That Keep Us Safe, These Same Laws Condemn Us To Boredom.

Honest Is How I Want To Look. The Truth Doesn't Glitter And Shine.

I Still Love Him So Much I'll Hide Any Amount Of Conjugated Estrogen In His Food. So Much I'll Do Anything To Destroy Him.

I Still Love Him

I Take Pens And I Write On The Inside Of My Arm. When I'm With People And Somebody Says A Really Fascinating Anecdote, Or Fact, Or Phrase, I'll Write It On The Inside Of My Arm. At The End Of The Day, I'll Take The Very Best Things That Are On My Arm And I'll Copy Them Into A Notebook That I Always Carry And Only When The Weather Is Absolutely Terrible Will I Really Key The Very Best Of That Notebook Into The Computer. At That Point, It's All Sort Of Censored Twice - Only The Best Things Go From The Arm To The Book And Only The Best Things Go From The Book To The Computer.

The Old Rule About How A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever, In My Experience, Even The Most Beauteous Thing Is Only A Joy For About Three Hours, Tops. After That, She'll Want To Tell You All About Her Childhood Traumas. Part Of Meeting These Jail Girls Is It's So Sweet To Look At Your Watch And Know She'll Be Behind Bars In Half An Hour.

You're A Product Of Our Language, And How Our Laws Are And How We Believe Our God Wants Us. Every Bitty Molecule About You Has Already Been Thought Out By Some Million People Before You. Anything You Can Do Is Boring And Old And Perfectly Okay. You're Safe Because You're So Trapped Inside Your Culture. Anything You Can Conceive Of Is Fine Because You Can Conceive Of It. You Can't Imagine Any Way To Escape. There's No Way You Can Get Out.the World Is Your Cradle And Your Trap.

By The Time You Read This, You'll Be Older Than You Remember.

These Distraction-oholics. These Focus-ophobics.

Any Time Some Well-meaning Person Forces You To Demonstrate You Have No Talent And Rubs Your Nose In The Fact You're A Failure At The Only Dream You Ever Had, Take Another Drink.

I Wish I Had The Courage Not To Fight And Doubt Everything... I Wish, Just Once, I Could Say, 'this. This Is Good Enough. Just Because I Choose It.

Part Of Her Doing Suicide Intervention Is My Caseworker Has To Mix Me Another Gin And Tonic.

The Same Architect Who Designed The Seattle Fair's Futuristic Science Center, With Its Lacy Gothic Arches And Spires, Minoru Yamasaki, Was Hired To Design The Twin Towers Of The World Trade Center. Seattle Had Promised Fairgoers A Glimpse Of The World That Would Exist In 2001. That Year Eventually Unfolded As Something Less Than The Dream We'd Imagined.

Big Brother Isn’t Watching. He’s Singing And Dancing. He’s Pulling Rabbits Out Of A Hat. Big Brother’s Busy Holding Your Attention Every Moment You’re Awake. He’s Making Sure You’re Always Distracted. He’s Making Sure You’re Fully Absorbed.

I'm Giving You My Life To Prove To Myself I Can, I Really Can Love Somebody. Even When I'm Not Getting Paid, I Can Give Love And Happiness And Charm. You See, I Can Handle The Baby Food And The Not Talking And Being Homeless And Invisible, But I Have To Know That I Can Love Somebody. Completely And Totally, Permanently And Without Hope Of Reward, Just As An Act Of Will, I Will Love Somebody.

Doesn't Reincarnation Strike You As Just Another Form Of Procrastination?

Procrastination

Anymore, No One's Mind Is Their Own.

Now This Is The First Rule Of Fight Club: There Is Nothing A Blue Collar Nobody In Oregon With A Public School Education Can Imagine That A Million-billion People Haven't Already Done.

I Ran. I Ran Until My Muscles Burned And My Veins Pumped Battery Acid. Then I Ran Some More.

No Matter How Much You Love Someone, You Still Want To Have You Own Way.

My Books Do Have A Sort Of Romantic Community At The End - People Coming Together. But On A More Basic Level, I Always See Them As Being About Power, In The Same Way That Harry Potter Books Are Pitched To A Population Of Young People Who Really Have No Power.

My Books Are Always About Someone Obtaining A Power To Replace The Previous Sort Of Power That They Held.

I Am A Writer And The Greatest Compliment I Can Get Is To Know That I've Contributed Language To The Culture, That I've Defined Something, Given It A Name. So I Think That Is One Of The Great Things A Writer Can Do.

If You Worry About Disaster All The Time, That's What You're Going To Get.

If You Start In The Pit Of Despair With These Profane, Awful Things, Even A Glimmer Of Hope Or Awareness Is Going To Occur That's Much Brighter Coming From This Dark, Awful Beginning.

I Wanted To Write About The Moment When Your Addictions No Longer Hide The Truth From You. When Your Whole Life Breaks Down. That's The Moment When You Have To Somehow Choose What Your Life Is Going To Be About.

A Short Story Is Something That You Can Hold In Your Mind. You Can Really Analyze How The Entire Thing Works, Like A Machine

Yes, I Kidnapped That Lindberg Baby.

The Only Thing I Shy Away From Is Non-consensual Violence. I Can't Write A Story Where Someone Is A Simple Victim Because It's Boring.

If You Can Change The Way People Think. The Way They See Themselves. The Way They See The World. If You Do That, You Can Change The Way People Live Their Lives. That's The Only Lasting Thing You Can Create.

On A Night Without Moon Or Stars You Can't See A Thing, But You Can Imagine Anything.

My Point Is, That If I'm Honest, My Life Is All About Me.

Emotionally, In Our Minds, We Get So Filled With Resentments Where We've Got A Story About Absolutely Everything.

It's Only In Drugs Or Death We'll See Anything New, And Death Is Just Too Controlling.

Your Handwriting. The Way You Walk. Which China Pattern You Choose. It's All Giving You Away. Everything You Do Shows Your Hand. Everything Is A Self Portrait. Everything Is A Diary.

If The Living Are Haunted By The Dead, Then The Dead Are Haunted By Their Own Mistakes.

We All Have Some Proper Noun To Blame.

Think Of A Rock Polisher, One Of Those Drums, Goes Round And Round, Rolls Twenty-four/seven, Full Of Water And Rocks And Gravel. Grinding It All Up. Round And Round. Polishing Those Ugly Rocks Into Gemstones. That’s The Earth. Why It Goes Around. We’re The Rocks. And What Happens To Us—the Drama And Pain And Joy And War And Sickness And Victory And Abuse—why, That’s Just The Water And Sand To Erode Us. Grind Us Down. To Polish Us Up, Nice And Bright.

These Flowers Will Be Rotten In A Couple Hours. Birds Will Crap On Them. The Smoke Here Will Make Them Stink, And Tomorrow A Bulldozer Will Probably Run Over Them, But For Right Now They Are So Beautiful.

People Have To Really Suffer Before They Can Risk Doing What They Love.

You Can't Be Beautiful," Brandy Says About A Thousand Times, "until You Feel Beautiful.

No Matter What Else You Came Up Against, If You Could Smile And Laugh While A Monkey Did You With Chestnuts In A Dank Concrete Basement While Somebody Took Pictures, Well, Any Other Situation Would Be A Piece Of Cake

The Only Funny Part About Colonial Dunsboro Is Maybe It's Too Authentic, But For All The Wrong Reasons. This Whole Crowd Of Losers And Nutcases Who Hide Out Here Because They Can't Make It In The Real World, In Real Jobs — Isn't This Why We Left England In The First Place? To Establish Our Own Alternate Reality. Weren't The Pilgrims Pretty Much The Crackpots Of Their Time? For Sure, Instead Of Just Wanting To Believe Something Different About God's Love, The Losers I Work With Want To Find Salvation Through Compulsive Behaviors.

Believe In Me And Die Forever.

Still, It's Nice To Have One Person Who Knows All Your Secrets.

Love Is Bullshit. Emotion Is Bullshit.

You Think Maybe If You Just Work Harder And Faster, You Can Hold Off The Chaos, But Then One Day You’re Changing A Patio Light Bulb With A Five-year Life Span And You Realize How You’ll Only Be Changing This Light Maybe Ten More Times Before You’ll Be Dead.

Most People Would Never Admit It, But They'd Been Bitching Since They Were Born. As Soon As Their Head Popped Out Into That Bright Delivery-room Light, Nothing Had Been Right. Nothing Had Been As Comfortable Or Felt So Good. Just The Effort It Took To Keep Your Stupid Physical Body Alive, Just Finding Food And Cooking It And Dishwashing, The Keeping Warm And Bathing And Sleeping, The Walking And Bowel Movements And Ingrown Hairs, It Was All Getting To Be Too Much Work.

The World Can Be A Lot Better Than We Settle For. All You Have To Do Is Ask.

I Will Never Write A Sequel To Anything That I Will Ever Write.

For Thousands Of Years, Human Beings Had Screwed Up And Trashed And Crapped On This Planet, And Now History Expected Me To Clean Up After Everyone. I Have To Wash Out And Flatten My Soup Cans. And Account For Every Drop Of Used Motor Oil. And I Have To Foot The Bill For Nuclear Waste And Buried Gasoline Tanks And Landfilled Toxic Sludge Dumped A Generation Before I Was Born.

Yeah. Well. Whatever. You Can't Teach God Anything.

Fight Club Book

Don't Do This. I Love You. Don't Shut Me Out.

Masochism Is A Valuable Job Skill.

People Used What They Called A Telephone Because They Hated Being Close Together And They Were Scared Of Being Alone.

It Can Only Take A Moment To Waste The Rest Of Your Life.

People Take Conventional Ways That Other People Have Always Decorated Their Cars, And Use Them As Ways Of Giving Other People Permission To Approach Them.

You Can Spend Your Whole Life Building A Wall Of Facts Between You And Anything Real.

Jump Way Back To One Time, Evie And Me Did This Fashion Shoot In A Junk Yard, In A Slaughterhouse, In A Mortuary. We'd Go Anywhere To Look Good By Comparison, And What I Realize Is Mostly What I Hate About Evie Is The Fact That She's So Vain And Stupid And Needy. But What I Hate Most Is How She's Just Like Me. What I Really Hate Is Me So I Hate Pretty Much Everybody.

I Always Really Curious To See How People Interpret Things. I Know My Version, And I'm Kind Of Bored With My Version So I Want To See Their Version.

The Rules That I Adhere To Are The Rules Of Minimalism. And Those Rules Kind Of Force Writing To Be More Filmic... To Have The Immediacy And Accessibility Of Film So That The Reader Really Has To Fill In A Lot Of The Details.

Narrator: You Had To Give It To Him: He Had A Plan. And It Started To Make Sense, In A Tyler Sort Of Way. No Fear. No Distractions. The Ability To Let That Which Does Not Matter Truly Slide.

I Think That Young People Are Less Attached To Items And Objects Now. They're Less Attached To Consuming Things And Accruing Things Because They See It As A System That Doesn't Necessarily Work And Give Them A Sense Of Adulthood And Fulfillment. They're Much More In Tune With Wanting To Achieve A Skill, A Form Of Self-expression, Or A Body Of Knowledge That Fulfills The Same Function, Fulfills Their Adulthood.

It Is A Hundred-year-old Witch Book, Bound In Human Skin And Probably Written In Ancient Cum...you Lick It!

Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, I'll Be Anybody You Want Me To Be. Use Me. Change Me. I Can Be Thin With Big Breasts And Big Hair. Take Me Apart. Make Me Into Anything, But Just Love Me.

The Only Difference Between Suicide And Martyrdom Is Press Coverage.

I'm Not Sure What We're Running From. Nobody. Or The Future. Fate. Growing Up. Getting Old. Picking Up The Pieces. As If Running We Won't Have To Get On With Our Lives.

Get Married Before The Sex Gets Boring Or You'll Never Get Married.

Any 'artist' Makes A Living By Expressing What Others Can't - Because They're Unaware Of Their Feelings, They're Too Afraid To Express Those Feelings, Or They Lack The Skills To Communicate And Be Understood.

What If Reality Is Nothing But Some Disease?

Suicide Is Very Contagious.

Picture The Moment When Your Mom And Dad First Saw You As Something Other Than A Pretty, Tiny Version Of Them. You As Them, But Improved. Better Educated. Innocent. Then Picture When You Stopped Being Their Dream.

What We Call Chaos Is Just Patterns We Haven’t Recognized. What We Call Random Is Just Patterns We Can't Decipher.

I'm Really Glad That I Spent My Twenties Messing Around And Having Disaster After Disaster - With People Who Were Doing Likewise - Because It's Really My Greatest Treasure Now.

Greatest Treasure

With A Gun Barrel Between Your Teeth, You Speak Only In Vowels.

There's A Moment In Every Book When The Book Turns And It Surprises Me.

Writing Is Like Sex, If It's Difficult You're Not Doing It Right.

Seek Midday Nourishment. Visit Memorial Acclaimed War Hero Colonel Sanders.

Everything Is A Self-portrait. A Diary. Your Whole Drug History’s In A Strand Of Your Hair. Your Fingernails. The Forensic Details. The Lining Of Your Stomach Is A Document. The Calluses On Your Hand Tell All Your Secrets. Your Teeth Give You Away. Your Accent. The Wrinkles Around Your Mouth And Eyes. Everything You Do Shows Your Hand.

Going To Work Just Looked Crazy. Eating Another Meal, Ever, Made About As Much Sense As Planting Tulip Bulbs In The Shadow Of A Falling Atom Bomb.

It's Funny How You Never Think About The Women You've Had. It's Always The Ones Who Get Away That You Can't Forget.

Women Are Already Born So Far Ahead Ability-wise. The Day Men Can Give Birth, That's When We Can Start Talking About Equal Rights.

I See So Many Tattoos Of My Stuff On People - Tattoos Of My Book Covers, Tattoos Of Quotes . . . It's Kind Of Daunting Sometimes.

Cassie Wright Knows, The Moment You Make Yourself Available To Any Man, He Starts To Take You For Granted

We All Want To Explain Ourselves. Nobody Wants To Be Forgotten.

The Unreal Is More Powerful Than The Real. Because Nothing Is As Perfect As You Can Imagine It. Because Its Only Intangible Ideas, Concepts, Beliefs, Fantasies That Last. Stone Crumbles. Wood Rots. People, Well, They Die. But Things As Fragile As A Thought, A Dream, A Legend, They Can Go On And On. If You Can Change The Way People Think. The Way They See Themselves. The Way They See The World. You Can Change The Way People Live Their Lives. That's The Only Lasting Thing You Can Create.

The Only Person We'll Hate More Than Each Other Is Ourselves.

You Don’t Care Where I Live Or How I Feel, Or What I Eat Or How I Feed My Kids Or How I Pay The Doctor If I Get Sick, And Yes I Am Stupid And Bored And Weak, But I Am Still Your Responsibility.

Intellectual Culture Seems To Separate High Art From Low Art. Low Art Is Horror Or Pornography Or Anything That Has A Physical Component To It And Engages The Reader On A Visceral Level And Evokes A Strong Sympathetic Reaction. High Art Is People Driving In Volvos And Talking A Lot. I Just Don't Want To Keep Those Things Separate. I Think You Can Use Visceral Physical Experiences To Illustrate Larger Ideas, Whether They're Emotional Or Spiritual. I'm Trying To Not Exclude High And Low Art Or Separate Them.

We're The Culture That Cried Wolf.

You Gain Power By Pretending To Be Weak. By Contrast, You Make People Feel Strong. You Save People By Letting Them Save You.

You Have A Class Of Young Strong Men And Women, And They Want To Give Their Lives To Something. Advertising Has These People Chasing Cars And Clothes They Don't Need. Generations Have Been Working In Jobs They Hate, Just So They Can Buy What They Don't Really Need. We Don't Have A Great War In Our Generation, Or A Great Depression, But We Do, We Have A Great War Of The Spirit. We Have A Great Revolution Against The Culture. The Great Depression Is Our Lives. We Have A Spiritual Depression.

I Know That When A Supersexy Older Girl With Hips And Breasts And Nice Hair Wants To Take Off Your Glasses And To Paint You A Smoky Eye She's Merely Trying To Enroll You In A Beauty Contest She's Already Won. It's A Kind Of Slummy, Condescending Gesture, Like When Rich People Ask Poor People Where They Summer. To Me, This Smacks Of A Blatant, Insensitive "let Them Eat Cake" Type Of Chauvinism.

The Evil Queen Was Stupid To Play Snow White's Game. There's An Age Where A Woman Has To Move On To Another Kind Of Power. Money, For Example. Or A Gun.

There's No Way You Can Get The Past Right. You Can Pretend. You Can Delude Yourself, But You Can't Re-create What's Over.

Parenthood Is The Opiate Of The Masses.

Everything Is Still Falling Apart.

You Have No Idea What It Is Like To Constantly Disappoint People. You See It The Moment You Meet Them. You See In Their Eyes That They Expected Something So Entirely Different, And Here They Are Meeting You.

A Comedy Ends With A Wedding, And A Tragedy Ends With A Funeral: You Always Have To Juxtapose Sex And Death.

I Am Not Loved. I Am Not A Beautiful Soul. I Am Not A Good-natured, Giving Person. I Am Not Anybody's Savior.

Besides, It Happens Fast For Some People And Slow For Some, Accidents Or Gravity, But We All End Up Mutilated.

Experts In Ancient Greek Culture Say That People Back Then Didn't See Their Thoughts As Belonging To Them. When Ancient Greeks Had A Thought, It Occurred To Them As A God Or Goddess Giving An Order. Apollo Was Telling Them To Be Brave. Athena Was Telling Them To Fall In Love. Now People Hear A Commercial For Sour Cream Potato Chips And Rush Out To Buy, But Now They Call This Free Will. At Least The Ancient Greeks Were Being Honest.

Falling In Love

The Greatest Weapon Any Warrior Can Carry Into Battle Is Absolute Certainty Of Her Eternal Soul.

Everything You See Is Based On Fact Of A Event Thats Already Happen, Even Light Only Travels So Fast.

We Have Pain And Hate And Love And Joy And War In The World Because We Want Them.

I Am The Cause Of All My Upsets. I Am My Worst Enemy.

Someday You Will Die, And Until You Know That, You're Useless To Me.

I Have A Lot Of Money.

Didn't I Realize That Each Of Us Is A Sacred, Unique Snowflake Of Special Unique Specialness?

That’s The American Dream: To Make Your Life Into Something You Can Sell.

So Here I Am. This Is As Good As It Gets. Take It Or Leave It.

Good As It Gets

Imagine Books And Music And Movies Being Filtered And Homogenized. Certified. Approved For Consumption. People Will Be Happy To Give Up Most Of Their Culture For The Assurance That The Tiny Bit That Comes Through Is Safe And Clean. White Noise.

The Truth Is, Wherever You Choose To Be, It's The Wrong Place.

That’s How A Scary Story Works. It Echoes Some Ancient Fear. It Re-creates Some Forgotten Terror. Something We’d Like To Think We’ve Grown Beyond. But It Can Still Scare Us To Tears. It’s Something You’d Hoped Was Healed.

And I Can't Stand The Idea Of Being Alone. I Can't Bear The Thought Of Being Free.

I Think Standardization Is Really The First Step To Something Being Commodified.

As A Lower-class Kid, I Was Raised To Think Success Would Be Owning Stuff. Having That Great Job, Too. Now I Find My Parents' Dream Was Wrong. You Never Really Own Anything. And You're Never Really Finished As A Person.

I Don't Care What They Do With My Book So Long As The Flippin Check Clears.

Art Never Comes From Happiness.

It's Not Living Alone If You Keep A Rifle Under The Bed.

I Am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed, Sense Of Rejection.

This Is How It Is With Insomnia. Everything Is So Far Away, A Copy Of A Copy Of A Copy. The Insomnia Distance Of Everything, You Can't Touch Anything And Nothing Can Touch You.

We Opened Our Hearts. Hear Me, Heal Me, Save Me, Believe Me.

Don't Rush Or Force The Ending. All You Have To Know Is The Next Scene, Or The Next Few Scenes.

I Can Become Someone Else, Not Out Of Pressure And Desperation, But Merely Because A New Life Sounds Fun Or Interesting Or Joyful.

You Can Only Hold A Smile For So Long, After That It's Just Teeth.

My Writing Process Isn't A Very Organized Thing. The Actual Writing Part Is A Tiny Part Of My Life. I Often Write In Public. I Bring My Laptop Or Write Freehand In Notebooks. Then, I'll Read Through Them While I Exercise Or Walk The Dog. The Very Last Thing I Do Is The Sitting Alone At The Computer Part.

You Have A Choice. Live Or Die. Every Breath Is A Choice. Every Minute Is A Choice. To Be Or Not To Be.

It's So Quiet This High Up, The Feeling You Get Is That You're One Of Those Space Monkeys. You Do The Little Job You're Trained To Do. Pull A Lever. Push A Button. You Don't Understand Any Of It, And Then You Just Die.

That If You Could Acquire Enough, Accomplish Enough, You’d Never Want To Own Or Do Another Thing. That If You Could Eat Or Sleep Enough, You’d Never Need More. That If Enough People Loved You, You’d Stop Needing Love.

When Both Of You Are Beautiful, Neither Of You Is Beautiful. Together, As A Couple, You're Less Than The Sum Of Your Parts.

You Are Beautiful

You Must Realize That One Day You Will Die. Until Then You Are Worthless.

The Future Is Just Wasted On Some People.

Invisible Monsters

You Have To Give Up! You Have To Give Up! You Have To Realize That Someday You Will Die, Until You Know That, You Are Useless!

We've Taken The World Apart But We Have No Idea What To Do With The Pieces.

In The Big Factory Of Perfecting Human Souls, The Earth Was Kind Of Tumbler. The Sale As The Kind People Use To Polish Rocks. All Souls Come Here To Rub The Sharp Edges Off Each Other. This Isn't Suffering. It's Erosion.

I Could Imagine Myself Becoming One Of Marla's Stories.

I Am Jack's Complete Lack Of Surprise. I Am Jack's Broken Heart.

Drugs Or Overeating Or Alcohol Or Sex, It Was All Just Another Way To Find Peace. To Escape What We Know. Our Education. Our Bite Of The Apple.

We Hear The Ambient Noise Of Children Singing. We Hear Lions And Tigers Roar. Hyenas Laugh. Some Jungle Bird Or Howler Monkey Declares Its Existence, Screeching A Maniac's Gibberish. Our Entire World, Always Doing Battle Against The Silence And Obscurity Of Death.

No One Wants To Admit We're Addicted To Music. That's Just Not Possible. No One's Addicted To Music And Television And Radio. We Just Need More Of It, More Channels, A Larger Screen, More Volume. We Can't Bear To Be Without It, But No, Nobody's Addicted. We Could Turn It Off Anytime We Wanted. I Fit A Window Frame Into A Brick Wall. With A Little Brush, The Size For Fingernail Polish, I Glue It. The Window Is The Size Of A Fingernail. The Glue Smells Like Hair Spray. The Smell Tastes Like Oranges And Gasoline.

I Disconnect The Telephone To Keep The Outside World In It's Correct Place.

When A Regular Person Gets Sick, They Take An Aspirin. When A Writer Gets Sick, They Take Notes.

First Your Parents, They Give You Your Life, But Then They Try To Give You Their Life.

It's Only After We've Lost Everything That We're Free To Do Anything.

The Air Will Always Be To Filled With Something. Your Body Too Sore Or Tired. Your Father Too Drunk. Your Wife Too Cold. You Will Always Have Some Excuse Not To Live Your Life.

You Buy Furniture. You Tell Yourself, This Is The Last Sofa I Will Ever Need In My Life. Buy The Sofa, Then For A Couple Years You're Satisfied That No Matter What Goes Wrong, At Least You've Got Your Sofa Issue Handled. Then The Right Set Of Dishes. Then The Perfect Bed. The Drapes. The Rug. Then You're Trapped In Your Lovely Nest, And The Things You Used To Own, Now They Own You.

During The First World War, I Told Her, Hitler Had Been A Runner, Delivering Messages Between The German Trenches, And He Was Disgusted By Seeing His Fellow Soldiers Visit French Brothels. To Keep The Aryan Bloodlines Pure,and Prevent The Spread Of Venereal Disease, He Commissioned An Inflatable Doll That Nazi Troops Could Take Into Battle. Hitler Himself Designed The Dolls To Have Blond Hair And Large Breasts. The Allied Firebombing Of Dresden Destroyed The Factory Before The Dolls Could Ever Go Into Wide Distribution.

Help Me Give Up My Addiction To Hope.

There Are Only Patterns, Patterns On Top Of Patterns, Patterns That Affect Other Patterns. Patterns Hidden By Patterns. Patterns Within Patterns. If You Watch Close, History Does Nothing But Repeat Itself. What We Call Chaos Is Just Patterns We Haven't Recognized. What We Call Random Is Just Patterns We Can't Decipher. What We Can't Understand We Call Nonsense. What We Can't Read We Call Gibberish. There Is No Free Will. There Are No Variables.

If People Thought You Were Dying, They Gave You Their Full Attention.

Some Little Part Of Themselves For Someone In The Future To Discover. Maybe A Thought. We Were Here. We Built This. A Reminder.

To Preserve Yourself As The Center Of The World, To Stay Your Own Best Authority On Everything, Your Own Expert On All Topics, Infallible, Omniscient. Always, Every Time Of The Month, Forever: Use Birth Control.

Control The Things You Can Control. As For The Rest - God Bless It All.

Things You Can Control

The First Step - Especially For Young People With Energy And Drive And Talent, But Not Money - The First Step To Controlling Your World Is To Control Your Culture. To Model And Demonstrate The Kind Of World You Demand To Live In. To Write The Books. Make The Music. Shoot The Films. Paint The Art.

There Are People Out There Who Will Not Read Books, But Somehow They'll Read My Books.

I Am Nothing, And Not Even That.

There Are A Lot Of Things We Don't Want To Know About The People We Love.

When You Understand, That What You're Telling Is Just A Story. It Isn't Happening Anymore. When You Realize The Story You're Telling Is Just Words, When You Can Just Crumble Up And Throw Your Past In The Trashcan, Then We'll Figure Out Who You're Going To Be.

Invisible Monsters

Everybody's Still Miserable In The Same Way They've Always Been Miserable, And More And More Of My Friends - Especially My Male Friends - Find Themselves Taking Anti-anxiety, Psychotropic Drugs. It Seems Like Everybody I Know Is Wondering If They're Really Who They Are, Or Once The Prescription Runs Out, Will They Become Someone Different?

I Am An Invisible Monster, And I Am Incapable Of Loving Anybody. You Don't Know Which Is Worse.

That's How A Good Story Works. It Changes How You Feel. It Brings You To A Greater Appreciation, A Greater Joy, Of Your Own Existence.

I'm Never Going To Have To Work. None Of My Descendants Are Ever Going To Have To Work; This Is Going To Make Me So Much Money. It Was Such A Letdown When I Realized That Wasn't My Invention.

This Is Why I Loved The Support Groups So Much, If People Thought You Were Dying, They Gave You Their Full Attention. If This Might Be The Last Time They Saw You, They Really Saw You. Everything Else About Their Checkbook Balance And Radio Songs And Messy Hair Went Out The Window. You Had Their Full Attention. People Listened Instead Of Just Waiting For Their Turn To Speak. And When They Spoke, They Weren't Just Telling You A Story. When The Two Of You Talked, You Were Building Something, And Afterward You Were Both Different Than Before.

You Always Kill The One You Love.

We Are A Nation Of Physical Animals Who Have Forgotten How Much We Enjoy Being That. We Are Cushioned By This Kind Of Make-believe, Unreal World And Have No Idea What We Can Survive Because We Are Never Challenged Or Tested.

I Know This Because Tyler Knows This.

Fight Club Novel

I Would Pay Snakes To Bite Her.

I'm Only Confrontational With My Friends.

Love And Life Belongs To Great Risk.

I Learned All Those Jokes In Second Grade. Second Grade Is Really Where They Tell You Those Horrific Jokes, Racist Jokes And Misogynistic Jokes That You Have No Idea What They Mean, And You Just Memorize Them Because They Have A Very Strong Effect, They Make People Laugh In This Kind Of Nervous, Horrible Way, And It's Only Later That You Realize That You've Got A Head Full Of Crap.

Maybe The Truth Is I Really Want To Like You Instead.

The More Things You Own, The More They Own You.

There Are Worse Things Than Finding Your Wife And Child Dead. You Can Watch The World Do It. You Can Watch Your Wife Get Old And Bored. You Can Watch Your Kids Discover Everything In The World You've Tried To Save Them From. Drugs, Divorce, Conformity, Disease. All The Nice Clean Books, Music, Television. Distraction.

A Guy's Calling To Say He's Failing Algebra Ii. Just As A Point Of Practice, I Say, Kill Yourself. A Woman Calls And Says Her Kids Won't Behave. Without Missing A Beat, I Tell Her, Kill Yourself. A Man Calls To Say His Car Won't Start. Kill Yourself. A Woman Calls To Ask What Time The Late Movie Starts. Kill Yourself. She Asks, "isn't This 555-1327? Is This The Moorehouse Cineplex? I Say, Kill Yourself. Kill Yourself. Kill Yourself.

I Want To Find Something Else, Unknowable, Some Place That's Not On The Map. A Real Adventure.

"this Isn’t Really Death," Tyler Says, "we’ll Be Legend. We Won’t Grow Old." I Tongue The Barrel Into My Cheek And Say, Tyler, You’re Thinking Of Vampires.

Telling Some Stories, Miss Leroy Says, Is Committing Suicide.

This Wasn't Any Mere Song And Dance; Here Was A Bold, Blaring Declaration Howling Itself Into The Empty Face Of Death.

"getting Fired," Tyler Says, "is The Best Thing That Could Happen To Any Of Us. That Way, We’d Quit Treading Water And Do Something With Our Lives."

My First Time I Jacked Off, I Thought I'd Invented It. I Looked Down At My Sloppy Handful Of Junk And Thought, This Is Going To Make Me Rich.

Funny Relationship

Everyone Holds A Certain Type Of Power. For Young People, It's Their Youth, Their Attractiveness, And Their Energy. But They're Terrified That As Those Qualities Fade, What Are They Going To Replace That Form Of Power With?

Maybe The Only Thing Each Of Us Can See Is Our Own Shadow. Carl Jung Called This His Shadow Work. He Said We Never See Others. Instead We See Only Aspects Of Ourselves That Fall Over Them. Shadows. Projections. Our Associations. The Same Way Old Painters Would Sit In A Tiny Dark Room And Trace The Image Of What Stood Outside A Tiny Window, In The Bright Sunlight. The Camera Obscura. Not The Exact Image, But Everything Reversed Or Upside Down.

Your Folks Are God, You Love Them And You Want To Make Them Happy But You Still Want To Make Up Your Own Rules.

Anytime My Work Can Coax Bodily Fluids Out Of Someone, I'm Happy.

If Marilyn Monroe Was Alive Right Now, What Would She Be Doing?' Clawing At The Roof Of Her Coffin.

It's My Petty Fear Of Personal Rejection That Allows So Many True Evils To Exist. My Cowardice Enables Atrocities.

Everyone Is Equal And Everyone Is Forced To Participate; You Can't Just Be A Spectator.

Everyone Is Equal

Inspiration Needs Disease, Injury, Madness.

I Say Let Me Never Be Complete, I Say May I Never Be Content,i Say Deliver Me From Swedish Furniture, I Say Deliver Me From Clever Arts, I Say Deliver Me From Clear Skin And Perfect Teeth,i Say You Have To Give Up! I Say Evolve, And Let The Chips Fall Where They May!

I Believe In Something. But I Don't Believe That Anything Can Hold A Grudge For Long Enough To Condemn Its Creation To Eternal Punishment. Nobody Can Hold A Grudge That Long, Even God.

You're Safe Because You're So Trapped Inside Your Culture. Anything You Can Conceive Of Is Fine Because You Can Conceive Of It.

So If You Think This Is Going To Save You...if You Think Anything Is Going To Save You...please Consider This Your Final Warning.

In All Probability The Human Genome Project Will, Someday, Find That I Carry Some Recessive Gene For Optimism, Because Despite All My Best Efforts I Still Can't Scrape Together Even A Couple Days Of Hopelessness. Future Scientists Will Call It The Pollyanna Syndrome, And If Forced To Guess, I'd Say That Mine Has Been A Way-long Case History Of Chasing Rainbows.

Chasing Rainbows

The Same Way A Compact Disk Isn't Responsible For What's Recorded On It, That's How We Are. You're About As Free To Act As A Programmed Computer. You're About As One-of-a-kind As A Dollar Bill.

The Best Way To Waste Your Life, Is By Taking Notes. The Easiest Way To Avoid Living Is To Just Watch. Look For The Details. Report. Don't Participate.

The One You Love And The One Who Loves You Are Never, Ever The Same Person.

Rant Said That View Of Time Was Set Up So Folks Won't Live Forever. It's The Planned Obsolescence We've All Agreed To...'nothing Says You Have To Swallow This,' Rant Told Me. 'you Can Always Just Die.

A Child Who Is Disillusioned Abruptly, By His Peers Or Siblings, Being Ridiculed For His Faith And Imagination, May Choose Never To Believe In Anything- Tangible Or Intangible- Again. To Never Trust Or Wonder.

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Sydney J. Harris

Anselm Of Canterbury

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