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223c462
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Life in These United States. Laughter Is the Best Medicine.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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4448d18
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One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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96cda4f
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Because the only frontier left is the world of intangibles, ideas, stories, music, art. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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d2797e4
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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.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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ebc79da
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One step to the sink, and I calmly begin to scrub my dripping hands, careful to pick and scrape the words sorrow and tragedy from where they're lodged beneath each fingernail.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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66ba21f
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What you have to know is that Marla is still alive. Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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5969829
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You never know the complicated deals two people negotiate in order to stay married beyond the first ten minutes.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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f890178
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I am the all-singing, all-dancing crap of this world," the space monkey tells the mirror. "I am the toxic waste by-product of God's creation."
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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511543e
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I was planning to buy a dog and name it "Entourage." This is how bad your life can get."
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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59e2575
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it's nice to have one person who knows all your secrets
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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c8a3790
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You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you. All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog. People really need somebody they feel superior to. So stay downtrodden.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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098e722
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Purgatory is where you unwrite the book of your life story
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escribir-hasta-la-muerte
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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eeacae1
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Katherine's theory is that everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city where they can live is Portland. This gives us the most cracked of the crackpots. The misfits among misfits. "We just accumulate more and more strange people," she says. "All we are are the fugitives and refugees."
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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fc3c31b
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what you can't understand you can make mean anything.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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e94a4e5
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statues of saints in somebody else's religion. To me they're just rock shaped into glorified nobodies.
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statue
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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ef152a4
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I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, "no, that's not right." Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything."
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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3d2c11b
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And maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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c1cc64e
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We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact," Tyler said. "So don't fuck with us."
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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566241f
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Here at St. Anthony's, they have to close the curtains before it gets dark, since if a resident sees themself reflected in a window they'll think somebody's peeping in at them. It's called "sun-downing." When all the old folks get crazy at sunset." --
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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712f84e
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In the workshop where I started to write fiction, you had to read your work in public. Most times, you read in a bar or coffeehouse where you'd be competing with the roar of the espresso machine. Or the football game on television. Music and drunk people talking. Against all this noise and distraction, only the most shocking, most physical, dark and funny stories got heard. Our test audience would never sit still for "Barn-Raising Club."
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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6f5a534
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I just want the days of my life to add up to something. The way every day of your life, the way it can just disappear in front of the television, Denny says he wants a rock to show for each day. Something tangible. Just one thing. A little monument to mark the end of each day.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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e6eca70
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To be honest, I keep wishing we could all talk. Chew the fat. And, yes, I know that wishing is another symptom of hope, but I can't help it. As we amble along, trudging over steaming brimstone beds of sulfur and coal, I want to ask if anyone else feels an intense sense of shame. By dying, do they feel as if they've disappointed everyone who ever bothered to love them? After all the effort that so many people made to raise them, to feed and ..
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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410b9c4
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the guy said industry slang for flight attendant was Space Waitress. Or Air Mattress.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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a4efd58
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It's amazing what a woman will read into it if you by accident say, I love you. Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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c356427
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And, it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everyone.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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a0330d1
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Fat," the mechanic says, "liposuctioned fat sucked out of the richest thighs in America. The richest, fattest thighs in the world." Our goal is the big red bags of liposuctioned fat we'll haul back to Paper Street and render and mix with lye and rosemary and sell back to the very people who paid to have it sucked out. At twenty bucks a bar, these are the only folks who can afford it. "The richest, creamiest fat in the world, the fat of the ..
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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6d650be
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For hate is a form of passionate attachment, and to be despised seems better than to be unknown.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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218e9a5
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A headache, I get the kind of headache God would smote you with in the Old Testament.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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9d786f7
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You're a projectionist and you're tired and angry, but mostly you're bored so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth, and you splice this frame of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina close-up into another feature movie. This is one of those pet adventures, when the dog and cat are left behind by a traveling family and must find their way home. I..
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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7234ba2
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Consider that the earth is a processing plant, a factory. Picture a tumbler used to polish rocks: a rolling drum filled with water and sand. Consider that your soul is dropped in as an ugly rock, some raw mineral or natural resource, crude oil, mineral ore. And all conflict and pain is the abrasive that rubs us, polishes our soul, refines us, teaches and finishes us over lifetime after lifetime.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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3f5527c
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That would be like breaking a mirror for showing you the truth.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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0c54185
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This really happens. It sounds trite, but only because words make everything true sound trite. Because words always screw up what you're trying to say.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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abafb8d
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everything wooden swells and shrinks, and the nails in everything wooden, the floors and baseboards and window casings, the nails inch out and rust. Everywhere there are rusted nails to step on or snag your elbow on, and there's only one bathroom for the seven
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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ec507e2
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After a few fights, you're afraid a lot less.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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43c56eb
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Because we love our pain. We love our drama. But we will never, ever admit that.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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9e689bf
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The way to make most women break eye contact is to run your tongue around your lips. The ones who dont look away, for serious, bingo.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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d618eb5
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It's music as wallpaper, utilitarian, music as Prozac or Xanax to control how you feel. Music as aerosol room freshener.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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344452f
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Why are you alone? I mean, we are all alone. Aloneness is... that's life. It's the quality of our aloneness that matters.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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fd3a785
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Solitude is a natural place for a writer to be.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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8be8455
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Kalbime bir bicak saplanmis gibi hissediyordum ve basimdan gecen tum olaylara ragmen hala incitilmek icin sonsuz ve engellenemez bir potansiyelim oldugunu kesfetmistim.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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1e68601
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Rachel hadn't invented the dangers of toxoplasmosis; she'd gone online and built an airtight case. This wasn't crazy talk. Neurobiologists had linked T. gondii to suicide and the onset of schizophrenia. All caused by exposure to cat poop. Some studies even suggested that the toxo brain parasites chemically coerced people to adopt more cats. Those crazy cat ladies were actually being controlled by an infection of single-cell invaders. The
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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f9a1a03
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If it was him in those pictures with the monkey, he could look at them every day and think: 'If I could do this, I could do anything'. 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 and somebody took pictures, well, any other situation would be a piece of cake. Even hell. More and more, for the stupid little kid, that was the idea... That if someday you..
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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9023f06
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Flattery is addictive. Convince others they are special. Assure them they have talent. Make yourself the source of people's self worth. Doing so binds them to you and it preempts them from developing their skills and proving their true potential.
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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22b3cf8
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If you want Neil Gaiman I could draw you a map.
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Chuck Palahniuk |