"For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose... watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh. I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut-hosing orgasm. Painting a picture, composing an opera, that's just something you do until you find the next willing piece of ass."

"The point was, there'd be nothing to this if you were beautiful and sexy.
The point was, in a world where everybody had to look so pretty all the time, this guy wasn't. The monkey wasn't. What they were doing wasn't.
The point was, it's not the sex part of pornography that hooked the stupid little boy. It was the confidence. The courage. The complete lack of shame. The comfort and genuine honesty. The up-front-ness of being able to just stand there and tell the world: Yeah, this is how I chose to spend a free afternoon. Posing here with a monkey putting chestnuts up my ass.  And I really don't care how I look. Or what you think.
So deal with it.  He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself."

"It's tough not to come here and soak up the blame for every crime in history. You want to shout in everybody's old toothless face. Yes, I kidnapped the Lindbergh baby.
The Titanic thing, I did that.  The Kennedy assassination deal, yeah, that was me.
The big World War II gizmo, that atom bomb contraption, well guess what? That was my doing.  The AIDS bug? Sorry. Me, again."

Fight Club

"For six months, I couldn't sleep.
With insomnia, nothing is real.
Everything is far away. Everything
is a copy of a copy of a copy."

"That old saying, how you always hurt
the one you love, well, it works both
ways."

"And then... something happened. I let go.
Lost in oblivion -- dark and silent
and complete. I found freedom. Losing
all hope was freedom."

"If I did have a tumor, I would name it
Marla. Marla, the little scratch on the
roof of your mouth that would heal if only
you would stop tonguing it, but you can't."

"I felt like putting a bullet between the
eyes of every Panda that wouldn't screw to save its
species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers
and smother all the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted
to breathe smoke."

"Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great War.
Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives."

"In the world I see -- you're stalking elk through
the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.
You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your
life. You will climb the wrist- thick kudzu vines that wrap
the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn and
laying-strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of the
ruins of a superhighway."

"It's only after you've lost everything
that you're free to do anything."

"We are defined by the choices we make."

"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make
you a chicken."

"Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat! It's not a seminar!
You have to forget everything you know, everything you think
you know -- about life, about friendship, about you and me."

"The condom is the glass slipper of our
generation. You slip it on, you dance
the night away with a stranger, and then
you throw it away - the condom, that is,
not the stranger."

"Like everyone else, I had become a
slave to the IKEA nesting instinct.
If I saw something like clever coffee
table sin the shape of a yin and yang,
I had to have it. I would flip through
catalogs and wonder, "What kind of dining
set defines me as a person?" We used to
read pornography. Now it was the Horchow
Collection. I had it all. Even the glass
dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections,
proof they were crafted by the honest,
simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of
wherever."

Invisible Monsters

"all around us, erosion and insects are just chewing up the world, never mind people and pollution. everything biodegrades with or without you pushing."

"what only looks like bulimia is how bald eagles feed their young."

"no matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close"

"game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education."

"when we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves."

"nothing of me is original. i am the combined efforts of everybody i've ever known."

"the one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."

"sometimes your best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize."

"there isn't any real YOU in YOU. even your physical body, all your cells will be replaced within eight years."

"be famous. be a big social experiment in getting what you don't want. find value in what we've been taught is worthless. find good in what the world says is evil."

“your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct."
 

Lullaby

"The sound shivers through the walls, through the table, through the window frame, and into my finger. These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics. Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed... and this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world."

"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."

"People are always spray the air with their moods. Their car stereos, broadcasting their grief or joy or anger all over the neighborhood."

"The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in details."

"People who would never throw litter from their cars will drive past you with their radios blaring. People who'd never blow cigar smoke at you in a crowded restaurant will bellow into their cell phones.... These people who would never spray herbicides or insecticides will fog the neighborhood with their stereos playing Scottish bagpipe music. Chinese opera. Country and western. Outdoors, a bird singing is fine. Patsy Cline is not..."

"You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger sound system. This is the arms race of sound. You don't win with a lot of treble. This isn't about quality, it's about volume. This isn't about music. This is about winning. You stomp the competition with the bass line. You rattle windows. You drop the melody line and shout the lyrics. You put in foul language and come down hard on each cussword. You dominate. This is really about power."

"'People die,' she says. 'People tear down houses. But furniture, fine, beautiful furniture, it just goes on and on, surviving everything.' She says, 'Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture.' And without breaking her stride, she drags the steel point of the key across the polished walnut face of a cabinet."

Survivor

"To stand here and try and fix her life is just a big waste of time. 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."

"This is fish number six hundred and forty-one in a lifetime of goldfish. My parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of God. 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 one day being dead and in the ground."

"Her voice makes me think of her mouth makes me think of her breath makes me think of her breasts."


"If the members of the church district ever felt summoned by God, rejoice. When the apocalypse was imminent, celebrate, and all Creedish must deliver themselves unto God, amen.
And you had to follow.

It didn't matter how far way. It didn't matter how long you'd been working outside the district colony. Since listening to broadcast communication was a no-no, it might take years for all church members to find out about the Deliverance. Church doctrine named it that. The Deliverance. The flight to Egypt. The flight out of Egypt. People are all the time running from one place to another in the Bible.  You might not find out for years, but the moment you found out, you had to find a gun, drink some poison, drown, hang, slash, or jump.  You had to deliver yourself to Heaven."

"Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished."

"They agent's yelling that no matter how good you look, your body is just something you wear to accept your Academy Award."

"Reality means you live until you die, the agent says. The real truth is nobody wants reality."

"She's the blasé eye of the hurricane that's the world around her."

"Please fasten your seat belts as we begin our terminal descent into oblivion."