Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

• You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.
• Art never comes from happiness.
• Growing strong and rich and smart was only the first half of your life story.
• Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
• The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.
• Everything in moderation, dude. Even recovery.
• Torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.
• And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody.
• People really need somebody they feel superior to.
• It's okay to cry to cry as long as you're faking it.
• Someday I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff.
• After long enough even the most generous people will stop sending a check.
• It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How if we can't explain something we'll just deny it.
• What does it get you if you can square root a triangle and then some terrorist shoots you in the head? It gets you nothing! This is the real education you need.
• I want you to know more than just what people think is safe to tell you.
• When you're thinking about the rest of your life, you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.
• It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than with the artwork itself.
• All of our making fun of things isn't making the world any better. We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.
• Maybe there's worse things you can do that just letting somebody old die.
• All my life, I've been less my mother's child than her hostage.
• Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever.
• Aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?
• Sex pretty much cures everything.
• Nothing is as good as you can imagine it.
• Sometimes a euphemism is more true than what it's supposed to hide.
• Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. People can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.
• We live and we die and anything else is just delusion.
• Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.
• A fire alarm is never about a fire, not anymore.
• Nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.
• She must've saved my life, because I don't know who the hell she is.
• Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this.
• I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.
• The world won't end with a whimper or a bang, but with a discreet, tasteful announcement.
• This is our whole culture of bigger, better, stronger, faster.
• In America, if your addiction isn't always new and improved, you're a failure.
• Please, just show me one thing in this world that is what you'd think.
• 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.'
• You have to trade your youth for something.
• Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.
• This is me trying to put things back the way they were before. Period revival. Me trying to reconstruct how my life worked until just a few weeks ago. How my dysfunction used to function so beautifully.
• The past, the future, life on other planets, everything is such an extension, such a projection of life as we know it.
• If you don't see somebody every day, you see them change.
• What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.
• I'd rather people hate me than feel sorry for me.
• I could pretend that my life was more than just waiting for the next disaster.
• Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit. I am a rock. A jerk. I'm an uncaring asshole and proud of it.
• If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.
• It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and constructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.
• You wonder, what aren't they telling us?
• Anything you can acquire is only another thing you'll lose.
• The answer is there is no answer.
• When you think about it, there's no good reason to do anything. There is no point.
• Why do I do anything? I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream.
• Someday, everything we just did will look like small potatoes to you.
• I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything.
• 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.
• Maybe knowing isn't the point.

8/20/2006