Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

• People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
• Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them on day being dead and in the ground.
• People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.
• That was the definition of our faith. Nothing was to be known. Anything was to be expected.
• You can't keep the whole Bible balanced in your head. You wouldn't have room to remember your name.
• Everything in your life turns into an item on a list. Something to accomplish. You get to see how your life looks flattened out.
• Nobody teaches you all the job skills you need in Home Economics, but over enough time, you pick them up.
• Today is just one of those days the sun comes out to really humiliate you.
• I just want some proof that death isn't the end.
• You get just enough to make ends meet.
• In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a stamp that said DEAD.
• These people will do anything to make me look incompetent.
• You could call me a gentleman's gentleman but you'd be wrong on both counts.
• Matthew, Chapter Twenty-four, Verse Thirteen: "But he that shall endure to the end, the same shall be saved."
• I Corinthians, Chapter Six, Verse Eighteen: "Flee fornication...he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body."
• It's okay. It's a sexual release, she tells me. It's perfectly natural. You find what you want. You stalk it. You grab it and make it your own. After you've had it, you throw it away.
• Maybe what I liked most about dancing is the rules. In the world where anything goes, here are solid arbitrary rules.
• I can't hold your hand forever. If you're going to kill yourself, I can't stop you, and it's not my fault.
• If you were fat you ate to lose weight, and if you were too skinny you just ate.
• Artificial men and women are posed in the windows wearing clothes. Smiling. Laughing. Pretending to have a good time. I know just how they feel.
• The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing.
• The sun's outside the bathroom window trying to show us we're all being stupid. All you have to do is look around.
• What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.
• The same as if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, you realize, if no one had been there to witness the agony of Christ, would we be saved?
• You realize that if no one's watching, you might as well stay home.
• You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. We can't give up our concept of who we were. All those adults playing archaeologist at yard sales, looking for childhood artifacts, board games, CandyLand, Twister, they're terrified. Trash becomes holy relics. Mystery Date. Hula Hoops. Our way of getting nostalgic for what we just threw in the trash, it's all because we're afraid to evolve. Grow, change, lose weight, reinvent ourselves. Adapt.
• Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.
• People are looking for that, a hand to hold. Reassurance. The promise that everything will be all right.
• Everything we did to fix me had side effects we had to fix. Then the fixes had side effects to fix and so on and so on.
• 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.
• Disaster movies have everybody expecting too much from nature.
• We all hear the same things on the radio, we all repeat the same talk to each other. There are no surprises left. There's just more of the same. Reruns.
• We remember almost none of our real childhoods, but we remember everything that happened to sitcom families.
• People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves.
• It's weird how the name outlives the person, the signifier outlasts the signified, the symbol the symbolized.
• No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing.
• Long-term we're all going to die. Then our bodies will rot. No surprise there. Short-term, we're going to live happily ever after.
• You don't have to control everything. You can't control everything
• If you worry about disaster all the time, that's what you're going to get.
• Even the garden of Eden was just a big fancy cage. You'll be a slave the rest of your life unless you bit the apple.
• Sex is the act that separates us from our parents.

11/25/2003