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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.

-Chuck Palahniuk

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You're A Product Of

Chuck Palahniuk

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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.

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

Believe In Me And Die Forever.

Nothing Feels As Awful As Pouring Your Heart Out To Some Talk Therapist, Then Realizing This So-called Professional Is Actually Vastly Stupid And You've Just Professed Your Most Secret Secrets To Some Goon Who's Wearing One Brown Sock And One Blue Sock.

To See How Boring You Really Are, Write A Book About Soap And Cults, And The Profits You Make Will Be Your Only Means Of Subsistence.

Imagine How You’d Feel If Your Whole Life Turned Into A Job You Couldn’t Stand.

By The Time You're Thirty, Your Worst Enemy Is Yourself.

The Tiny Space, The Toilet, Two Hundred Strangers Just A Few Inches Away, It's So Exciting, The Lack Of Room To Maneuver, It Helps If You're Double-jointed. Use Your Imagination. Some Creativity And A Few Simple Stretching Exercises And You Can Be Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Heaven's Door. You'll Be Amazed How Time Flies.

On Game Shows, Some People Will Take The Trip To France, But Most People Will Take The Washer And Dryer Pair.

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

Demons Are Former Celebrities Who Prey On Their Own Insecurities.

Maybe It's Our Sins That Give God Consolation When He Finally Has To Give Us Cancer.

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 Seems That So Much Writing Is Being Done In The Nineteenth-century Model, Where Every Connection Has To Be Thoroughly Explained.

Waiters Will Always Pee In Soup, People Will Always Fall In Love.

Falling In Love

There's A Terrible Dark Joy When The Only Person Who Knows All Your Secrets Is Finally Dead.

Why Should I Believe Any Of This?' It Happens That Fast. I Say, Because I Think I Like You. Marla Says, 'not Love?' This Is A Cheesy Enough Moment, I Say. Don't Push It.

Every Stage Of Life Has Its Own Form Of Power, And We're Always Sort Of Terrified As To Whether We Can Make The Jump To The Next Form Of Power.

Someone Bent On Suicide Won't Have Much Sense Of Humor Left.

His Saliva Tasted Like The Wet Dicks Of Ten Thousand Lonely Truck Drivers.

We Can Spend Our Lives Letting The World Tell Us Who We Are…or We Can Decide For Ourselves.

If You Make People Laugh Too Much, Their Blood Becomes - I Believe It Is Acidic As Opposed To Alkaline. It Changes The Oxygen Level In The Blood, And People Are Likelier To Pass Out At That Point.

If Your Body Is A Temple, You Can Pile Up Too Much Deferred Maintenance. If Your Body Is A Temple, Mine Was A Real Fixer-upper.

It's Easy To Attack And Destroy An Act Of Creation. It's A Lot More Difficult To Perform One.

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

This Is Less Teaching Than Damage Control. You May As Well Paint A House That’s On Fire.

Those Who Remember The Past Tend To Get The Story Really Screwed Up.

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

Rant Casey Used To Say, "no Matter What Happens, It's Always Now..." Talk About Cryptic. I Think What Rant Meant Was, We Live In The Present Moment Of Reality, And No Matter What's Come Before, No Matter How Much We Loved A Person Or A Dog, When It Attacks Us We'll React To That Moment Of Danger.

I Know So Many Writers Who Are A Hundred Times Better Than Me And Have Longer, Greater Ideas Than Mine, But They Gave Up; They Stopped. The Biggest Talent You Can Have Is Determination.

People Had Been Working For So Many Years To Make The World A Safe Organized Place. Nobody Realized How Boring It Would Become.

The Bigger The Mistake Looks, The Better Chance I'll Have To Break Out And Live A Real Life. Our Real Discoveries Come From Chaos. - Brandy Alexander

You Realize That There's No Point In Doing Anything If Nobody's Watching. You Wonder, If There Had Been A Low Turnout At The Crucifixion, Would They Have Rescheduled?

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.

People Would Ask Me To Autograph Their Bodies And Then The Next Time I'd See Them On Tour They'd Have My Autograph Tattooed. I Decided I Wouldn't Write On People Anymore, But I'd Give Them Arms And Legs And If They Wanted Those Autographed I'd Do That.

I Would Pay Snakes To Bite Her.

It's So Hard To Forget Pain, But It's Even Harder To Remember Sweetness. We Have No Scar To Show For Happiness. We Learn So Little From Peace.

The Feeling Is Less Like An Ending Than Just Another Starting Point.

When You're Thinking About The Rest Of Your Life, You're Never Really Thinking More Than A Couple Years Down The Road.

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.

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.

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

Procrastination

Only Through Destroying Myself Can I Discover The Greater Power Of My Spirit.

Fight Club Book

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.

All God Does Is Watch Us And Kill Us When We Get Boring. We Must Never, Ever Be Boring.

What I'm Always Trying To Do With Every Book Is To Recreate The Effect Of The Stories We Heard As Children In Front Of Campfires And Fireplaces - The Ghost Stories That Engaged Us.

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!

You Couldn't Have Small, Dying Children In A Movie Without Really Bringing Everyone Down, But You Can In Comics.

Let Me Be The Ring Leader In Your Guilt Gang-bang.

What Would Tyler Durden Do?

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 Biodiversity We're Going To Have Left Is Coke Versus Pepsi. We're Landscaping The Whole World One Stupid Mistake At A Time.

The Gyms You Go To Are Crowded With Guys Trying To Look Like Men, As If Being A Man Means Looking The Way A Sculptor Or An Art Director Says.

You Know How Both Life And Porno Movies End. The Only Difference Is Life Starts With The Orgasm.

Daytime Television, You Can Tell Who’s Watching By The Three Kinds Of Commercials. Either It’s Clinics For Drying Out Drunks. Or It’s Law Firms Who Want To Settle Injury Suits. Or It’s Schools Offering Mail-order Vocational Degrees To Make You A Bookkeeper. A Private Detective. Or A Locksmith. If You’re Watching Daytime Television, This Is Your New Demographic. You’re A Drunk. Or A Cripple. Or An Idiot.

Since Change Is Constant, You Wonder If People Crave Death Because It's The Only Way They Can Get Anything Really Finished.

He Was The Kind Of Boy Any Young Girl Should Date While She's Still Able To Recover.

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

Beginning With Santa In Infancy, And Ending With The Tooth Fairy As The Child Acquires Adult Teeth. Or, Plainly Put, Beginning With All The Possibility Of Childhood, And Ending With An Absolute Trust In The National Currency.

For This Moment, Nothing Matters. Look Up Into The Stars And You're Gone.

Here In Your Mind You Have Complete Privacy. Here There's No Difference Between What Is And What Could Be.

People Will Listen To You Only When They Know You're Dying, Otherwise They're Just Waiting For Their Turn To Talk.

The Future You Have, Tomorrow, Won't Be The Same Future You Had, Yesterday.

That Guy Behind Me On The Airplane? He's Been Kicking My Seat Because He Hates Me. He's Kicking My Seat Because He Hates Me And I'm Gonna Kill Him. When We Get Off This Plane, I'm Gonna Make Eye Contact. I'm Gonna Kill That Guy. And All Of That Is Just Stuff In My Head, But It's Good To Get Rid Of That Stuff.

I Figure If Eve Could Get Us Into This Mess, I Could Get Us Out. After All, God Really Likes To See A Go-getter.

If You Knew That Your Life Was Merely A Phase Or Short, Short Segment Of Your Entire Existence, How Would You Live? Knowing Nothing 'real' Was At Risk, What Would You Do? You'd Live A Gigantic, Bold, Fun, Dazzling Life. You Know You Would. That's What The Ghosts Want Us To Do - All The Exciting Things They No Longer Can.

Knowing Nothing

Yes, Terrible Things Happen, But Sometimes Those Terrible Things - They Save You.

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.

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.

And If You Can Find Any Way Out Of Our Culture, Then That's A Trap Too. Just Wanting To Get Out Of The Trap Reinforces The Trap.

Invisible Monsters

They Assume She Was Once Gorgeously Beautiful. Because Now She Looks So—bad.

Everything Is Funnier In Retrospect, Funnier And Prettier And Cooler. You Can Laugh At Anything From Far Enough Away.

I Think We're In An Age Starved For Genuine Experiences, Instead Of Cathartic Phony Experiences Through The Media, Structured, Engineered Experiences. And Those Are The Fast Food, The Masturbation Of Experience. They Don't Really Exhaust Any Aspect Of Ourselves; They Don't Make Us Any Stronger.

Mylife Might Be Little And Boring, But At Least It’s Mine - Not Some Assembly-line, Secondhand, Hand-me-down Life.

It's Exhausting, The Energy It Takes To Unknow A Truth.

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.

Without Pain, Without Sacrifice We Would Have Nothing. Like The First Monkey Shot Into Space.

What If Reality Is Nothing But Some Disease?

Some Mythological Fat Asswipe Drives Our National Economy.

National Economy

Screenwriters Get Paid A Hell Of A Lot More Money But Their Level Of Frustration Seems To Be So High That I Don't Want That.

As The Child Outlives The Father,so Must The Character Bury The Author.

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.

I Try To Tell A Story The Way Someone Would Tell You A Story In A Bar, With The Same Kind Of Timing And Pacing.

There Are The Most Fantastic, Beautiful Things And People Out There. It’s Up To You To Find Them.

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

Without Animals, There Would Be No Humanity. In A World Of Just People, People Will Mean Nothing . . .

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.

Just Keep Asking Yourself: What Would Jesus Not Do?

How Can You Possibly Believe He Really Loves You?” Miss Sneezy Looks From The Mother To The Saint To Mr. Whittier’s Hand.“you Have No Choice,” Mr. Whittier Tells Her. “if You Need To Be Loved.

Hello! Look At Me. Hello! I Am So Zen. This Is Blood. This Is Nothing. Hello. Everything Is Nothing, And It's So Cool To Be Enlightened. Like Me.

Regret, Daisy Knew, Was The Only Confirmation Of A Well-lived Life. If You Didn't Occasionally Go Too Far, You Weren't Going Anywhere.

When We Die, These Are The Stories Still On Our Lips. The Stories We’ll Only Tell Strangers, Someplace Private In The Padded Cell Of Midnight. These Important Stories, We Rehearse Them For Years In Our Head But Never Tell. These Stories Are Ghosts, Bringing People Back From The Dead. Just For A Moment. For A Visit. Every Story Is A Ghost.

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.

I Didn't Use Anybody's Story. I Used The Context And The Structure Of The Situation. People Were So, So Desperate To Tell Their Story And Begin To Digest Their Experience - Like Turning It Into A Story - That After The Fist Few Weeks I Could Go With A Pad And Pencil And Take Notes. People Didn't Seem At All Bothered By That.

May I Never Be Complete. May I Never Be Content. May I Never Be Perfect.

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.

Until You Find Something To Fight For, You Settle For Something To Fight Against.

I Often Need Physical Gesture To Balance Dialogue. If I Write In Public, Every Time I Need To Know What A Character Is Doing With His Hand Or Foot, I Can Look Up And Study People And Find Compelling Gestures That I Can Harvest. Writing In Public Gives You That Access To A Junkyard Of Details All Around You.

That's Why I Write, Because Life Never Works Except In Retrospect. You Can't Control Life, At Least You Can Control Your Version.

How Much Can You Know About Yourself If You've Never Been In A Fight?

And It's Funny How When Somebody Saves You, The First Thing You Want To Do Is Save Other People. All Other People. Everybody. The Kid Never Knew The Man's Name. But He Never Forgot That Smile. "hero" Isn't The First Word, But It's The First Word That Comes To Mind.

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

Nothing Shows You The Straight Line From Here To Death Like A List.

I Don't Want To Die Without A Few Scars.

Beginning With Santa Claus As A Cognitive Exercise, A Child Is Encouraged To Share The Same Idea Of Reality As His Peers. Even If That Reality Is Patently Invented And Ludicrous, Belief Is Encouraged With Gifts That Support And Promote The Common Cultural Lies. The Greatest Consensus In Modern Society Is Our Traffic Systems. The Way A Flood Of Strangers Can Interact, Sharing A Path, Almost All Of Them Traveling Without Incident. It Only Takes One Dissenting Driver To Create Anarchy.

What Makes Earth Feel Like Hell Is Our Expectation That It Should Feel Like Heaven.

A Good Story Isn't The One That Shuts Everyone Down And Sort Of Leaves Them In Silent Awe. A Good Story Is One That, Even Before You Finish The Anecdote, You Can See Their Eyes Shining Because It Has So Resonated With Something From Their Own Lives That Everyone In The Group Has A Version Of The Same Story And They Cannot Wait To Tell It, And That They're Going To Compete To Make Their Version Even More Extreme Than Your Version. So Your Version Is Just A Seed.

You Can Say Anything If Enough People Will Listen.

Invisible Monsters

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

I'm Always Trying To Reach A Transcendent Point, A Romantic Point, But Reach It In A Really Unconventional Way, A Really Profane Way. To Get To That Romantic, Touching, Heartbreaking Place, But Through A Lot Of Acts Of Profanity.

Which Is Worse, Hell Or Nothing?

Are These Things Really Better Than The Things I Already Have? Or Am I Just Trained To Be Dissatisfied With What I Have Now?

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

Picture Anybody Growing Up So Stupid He Didn't Know That Hope Is Just Another Phase You'll Grow Out Of.

I Wanted To Destroy Everything Beautiful I'd Never Have. Burn The Amazon Rain Forests. Pump Chlorofluorocarbons Straight Up To Gobble The Ozone. Open The Dump Valves On Supertankers And Uncap Offshore Oil Wells. I Wanted To Kill All The Fish I Couldn't Afford To Eat, And Smother The French Beaches I'd Never See. I Wanted The Whole World To Hit Bottom.

I Think It's Just A Matter Of Time Before Everybody Realizes That I'm Kind Of A Romance Novelist ... That These Are All Stories About People Kind Of Falling Back In Love Or Struggling With Relationships. Even Fight Club Was Just A Big Romantic Ending.

Does It Hurt Very Much To Die? Well, Sweetheart, Yes, But It Hurts A Lot More To Keep Living.

Demon Or Angel Or Evil Spirit, I Just Need Something To Show Itself. Ghoulie Or Ghosty Or Long-legged Beastie, I Just Want My Hand Held.

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.

I Have A Secret Goal With My Editor - He Has Asthma And Uses His Inhaler, And After I Send Him A New Manuscript, I'll Have His Assistant Phone Me And Tell Me How Many Times He Had To Get His Inhaler Out While Reading A Draft. It's My Secret Laugh Meter.

Deliver Me From Swedish Furniture. Deliver Me From Clever Art. And The Phone Rang And Tyler Answered. "if You Don't Know What You Want," The Doorman Said, "you End Up With A Lot You Don't." May I Never Be Complete. May I Never Be Content. May I Never Be Perfect. Deliver Me, Tyler, From Being Perfect And Complete.

Sometimes You Do Something, And You Get Screwed. Sometimes It's The Things You Don't Do, And You Get Screwed.

No Matter How Many Luxuries You Get, Something Will Be Missing. No Matter How Carefully You Choose, You'll Never Be Totally Happy.

Did Perpetual Happiness In The Garden Of Eden Maybe Get So Boring That Eating The Apple Was Justified?

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

If You Could Be Either God’s Worst Enemy Or Nothing, Which Would You Choose?

Fight Club Novel

Deliver Me, Tyler, From Being Perfect And Complete.

When You Go Out With A Drunk, You’ll Notice How A Drunk Fills Your Glass So He Can Empty His Own. As Long As You’re Drinking, Drinking Is Okay. Two’s Company. Drinking Is Fun. If There’s A Bottle, Even If Your Glass Isn’t Empty, A Drunk, He’ll Pour A Little In Your Glass Before He Fills His Own. This Only Looks Like Generosity.

Everybody Looks A Little Crazy If You're Looking Close Enough And If You Can't Look That Close, Then You Don't Really Love Them.

You're Always Haunted By The Idea You're Wasting Your Life.

Because I Can't Hit Bottom, I Can't Be Saved.

Every Masterpiece Is Just Dirt And Ash Put Together In Some Perfect Way.

A Shadow Of A Reflection Of An Image Of An Illusion.

You'll Need To Suffer To Make Any Real Art.

Leonardo's Mona Lisa Is Just A Thousand Thousand Smears Of Paint. Michelangelo's David Is Just A Million Hits With A Hammer. We're All Of Us A Million Bits Put Together The Right Way.

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.

There Was No Real Sense Of Life Because She Had Nothing To Contrast It With.

Fight Club Book

Fight Club Novel

My Writing Has To Excite People And Depict Or Include Their Experiences. That's Part Of My Process - To Go Out And Interact With People. It's Very Much Like An Archival Process. I Understand That The Brothers Grimm Would Go Out And Get People Talking So They Could Document Folk Tales That Weren't Being Documented Any Other Way. I Try To Offer A Little Bit Of Myself - Some Experience From My Life That Evokes Stories In Other People.

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.

Do You Remember When You Were 10 Or 11 Years Old And You Really Thought Your Folks Were The Best? They Were Completely Omniscient And You Took Their Word For Everything. And Then You Got Older And You Went Through This Hideous Age When Suddenly They Were The Devil, They Were Bullies, And They Didn't Know 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.

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

As An Artist You Organize Your Life So That You Get A Chance To Paint, A Window Of Time, But That's No Guarantee You'll Create Anything Worth All Your Effort. You're Always Haunt By The Idea You're Wasting Your Life.

A Writer's Job Is To Cultivate What Can Go Wrong. You're Always Looking For That Dramatic Arc Of Where Things Can Fail.

Also Consider That Someday, When You’re Dead And Rotted, Kids With Their Baby Teeth Will Sit In Their Time-geography Class And Laugh About How Stupid You Were.

Potassium Cyanide," Says The Talent Wrangler As She Leans Over To Pick Up A Paper Napkin Off The Floor. "found Naturally In The Cassava Or Manioc Roots Native To Africa, Used To Tint Architectural Blueprints In The Form Of The Deep-blue Pigment Known As Prussian Blue. Hence The Shade 'cyan' Blue.

More Than One Side? You're Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Jackass!

I'm Sorry If This All Seems A Little Rushed And Desperate. It Is.

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.

A Good Story Should Make You Laugh, And A Moment Later Break Your Heart.

People Fall So In Love With Their Pain, They Can’t Leave It Behind. The Same As The Stories They Tell. We Trap Ourselves.

I Went To Sexaholics Anonymous For Six Months. For Research. I Wanted To See The Structure Of The Groups, How They Were Conducted, And What The Atmosphere Was Like, And Also To Be Able To Describe The People As Human Beings, Rather Than As The Dirty Jokes That They Are In Our Culture.

Maybe We Should Always Assume The Worst.

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.

Because After You've Crossed Some Lines, You Just Keep Crossing Them. And There's No Escaping From Constant Escape. Distracting Ourselves. Avoiding Confrontation. Getting Past The Moment. Jacking Off. Television. Denial.

You Are Not A Beautiful And Unique Snowflake... This Is Your Life, And It's Ending One Minute At A Time.

Peter Used To Say That An Artist’s Job Is To Make Order Out Of Chaos. You Collect Details, Look For A Pattern, And Organize. You Make Sense Out Of Senseless Facts. You Puzzle Together Bits Of Everything. You Shuffle And Reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble.

A Good Story Should Change The Way You See The World.

They're Just Words Is All. Powerless. Vocabulary. Dialogue.

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

The Bad News Is We Don't Have Any Control. The Good News Is We Can't Make Any Mistakes.

What You Have To Understand, Is Your Father Was Your Model For God. If You're Male And You're Christian And Living In America, Your Father Is Your Model For God. And If You Never Know Your Father, If Your Father Bails Out Or Dies Or Is Never At Home, What Do You Believe About God? What You End Up Doing Is You Spend Your Life Searching For A Father And God. What You Have To Consider Is The Possibility That God Doesn't Like You. Could Be, God Hates Us. This Is Not The Worst Thing That Can Happen.

You Love Me. You Ignore Me. You Save My Life, Then You Cook My Mother Into Soap.

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.

So If Reality Is All A Spell, And You Don't Really Want What You Think You Want... If You Have No Free Will. You Don't Really Know What You Know. You Don't Really Love Who You Only Think You Love. What Do You Have Left To Live For?

At The Last Minute, I Couldn't Wear The Hitler Mustache Because Tiger Stripe Ate It; And Then I Didn't Want To Take My Kitty And Risk His Coughing Up Some Big Nazi Hairball On Someone's Front Stoop.

If You Look At Old Pictures, Irene Casey Is So Pretty. Not Just Young, But Pretty The Way You Look When Your Face Goes Smooth, The Skin Around Your Eyes And Lips Relaxed, The Pretty You Only Look When You Love The Person Taking The Picture.

Find Joy In Everything You Choose To Do. Every Job, Relationship, Home... It's Your Responsibility To Love It, Or Change It.

You Tell Yourself That Noise Is What Defines Silence. Without Noise, Silence Would Not Be Golden. Noise Is The Exception.

I Say Never Be Complete, I Say Stop Being Perfect, I Say Let... Lets Evolve, Let The Chips Fall Where They May.

That Quest For Something Pretty. A Cheat. A Cliche. Flowers And Christmas Lights, It's What We're Programmed To Love.

What Kind Of Dining Set Defines Me As A Person?

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

You See, Life Only Turns Out Good Or Bad For Only A Little Bit. And Then It Turns Out Some Other Way.

My Books Are More About People Experimenting With Different Identities And Social Models In A Short-term Way Before They Can Break Through To Something Authentic.

You Are Not Special. You Are Not A Beautiful Or Unique Snowflake. You're The Same Decaying Organic Matter As Everything Else.

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

Pretty Much Always. We Need To Tell The Story Of Our Life To Someone.

There's No Escaping Fate, It Just Keeps Going. Day And Night, The Future Just Keeps Coming At You.

Marla Tells Me How In The Wild You Don't See Old Animals Because As Soon As They Age, Animals Die. If They Get Sick Or Slow Down, Something Stronger Kills Them. Animals Aren't Meant To Get Old. Marla Lies Down On Her Bed And Undoes The Tie On Her Bathrobe, And Says Our Culture Has Made Death Something Wrong. Old Animals Should Be An Unnatural Exception. Freaks.

Don’t Ask Me When Because I Don’t Remember, But Somewhere Along The Way I Keep Forgetting To Commit Suicide.

I Was Tired And Crazy And Rushed, And Every Time I Boarded A Plane, I Wanted The Plane To Crash. I Envied People Dying Of Cancer. I Hated My Life. I Was Tired And Bored With My Job And My Furniture, And I Couldn’t See Any Way To Change Things. Only End Them.

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

Destruction Is Always An Attractive Idea. My Brother And I Used To Spend Weeks Making Models Of Cities So That We Could Destroy Them In 15 Minutes. There's A Fantastic Joy In Destroying Something That You've Meticulously Built. Then You're Free To Build A New Thing. Destruction And Creation They're Inseparable.

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

And It [fight Club Novel] Was Written So General That My Father Thought I Was Writing About His Father, And My Boss Thought I Was Writing About His Boss. People Really Put Themselves, You Know, In The Shoes Of The Narrator.

Nobody Wants To Worship You If You Have The Same Problems, The Same Bad Breath And Messy Hair And Hangnails, As A Regular Person. You Have To Be Everything Regular People Aren’t. Where They Fail, You Have To Go All The Way. Be What People Are Too Afraid To Be. Become Whom They Admire. People Shopping For A Messiah Want Quality. Nobody Is Going To Follow A Loser. When It Comes To Choosing A Savior, They Won't Settle For Just A Human Being.

Or Maybe...just Maybe This Whole Process Is Our Training Wheels Towards Something Bigger. If We Can Reflect And Know Our Lives, We Might Stay Awake And Shape Our Futures.

"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.

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.

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 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.

I Used To Work In A Funeral Home To Feel Good About Myself, Just The Fact That I Was Breathing.

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

We're So Structured And Micromanaged, This Isn't A World Anymore, It's A Damn Cruise Ship.

It's Nice To See Something More Pathetic Than I Feel Right Now.

I Try To Get Centered: Watching White Moon Face The Stars Never Feel Anger Blah, Blah, Blah, The End

You Cannot Be The Person They Know And The Great, Glorious Person You Want To Become. Not At The Same Time.

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.

With The Novels, I Usually Start From Something In My Own Life That I Can't Resolve, So I Turn It Into A Metaphor And For Months Or Sometimes Years I'll Exhaust All Of My Emotional Reaction To This Issue By Making It Enormous On The Page.

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Olusegun Obasanjo

Nelson A. Miles

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