Maja's quotes

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"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

tags: loss
643 people liked it

"The things you own end up owning you."
— Chuck Palahniuk

250 people liked it

"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."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

478 people liked it

"Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you."
— Chuck Palahniuk

217 people liked it

"The only difference between martyrdom and suicide is press coverage."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor: A Novel)

155 people liked it

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

268 people liked it

"You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

tags: identity
195 people liked it

"Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish."
— Chuck Palahniuk

tags: chaos, discovery
124 people liked it

"You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

96 people liked it

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

tags: identity, originality
423 people liked it

"I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?" Why did I cause so much pain? Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love? 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."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

tags: god, identity
129 people liked it

"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.
This is all practice."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

tags: life
199 people liked it

"A journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

tags: pessimism
73 people liked it

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

tags: education, game-shows
125 people liked it

"Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)

tags: big-brother
86 people liked it

"What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized yet."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

tags: chaos, patterns
82 people liked it

"We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

97 people liked it

"What we don't understand we can make mean anything."
— Chuck Palahniuk

106 people liked it

"You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm."
— Chuck Palahniuk

tags: life, pessimism
57 people liked it

"Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

tags: atheism, choice, jesus
58 people liked it

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
— Mahatma Gandhi

tags: carpe-diem, education, inspirational, learning
8,130 people liked it

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

tags: literacy
6,130 people liked it

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: intelligence, self-deprecation
7,613 people liked it

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

tags: activism, apathy, hate, indifference, love, opposite, philosophy
7,191 people liked it

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

tags: darkness, drive-out, hate, inspirational, light, love, peace
6,993 people liked it

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

tags: individuality, majority, minority, pause, reflect, wisdom
6,240 people liked it

"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."
— Malcolm X

tags: belief, integrity
6,611 people liked it

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

tags: wisdom
6,408 people liked it

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

tags: advertising, apple, change, commercial, computers, different, madness, misfits, nonconformity, progressive, quo, rebels, status, think, troublemakers
7,057 people liked it

"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."
— Dr. Seuss

tags: dreams, love, reality, sleep
10,479 people liked it

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

tags: deadlines, humor, work
5,370 people liked it

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain

tags: action, actions, disappointed, disappointment, discover, dream, dreams, explore, sail
7,799 people liked it

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

tags: best, life, love, mistakes, out-of-control, truth, worst
10,840 people liked it

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

tags: humor, scifi
3,287 people liked it

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."
— Miss Piggy

tags: humor
5,739 people liked it

"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: life
2,965 people liked it

"Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom."
— Aristotle

tags: wisdom
1,678 people liked it

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: love
864 people liked it

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
— e.e. cummings

tags: courage
2,273 people liked it

"book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. it is not a hobby. those who do it must do it. those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind."
— Jeanette Winterson

tags: books, obsession
261 people liked it

"What you risk reveals what you value."
— Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)

106 people liked it

"The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help."
— Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry)

tags: god, life
80 people liked it

"They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?"
— Jeanette Winterson

tags: inspirational
42 people liked it

"I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had."
— Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

44 people liked it

"If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem."
— Richard Bach

35 people liked it

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

tags: freethinker, inspirational, mad
1,115 people liked it

"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."
— Jack Kerouac

tags: failure, passion
144 people liked it

"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."
— Jack Kerouac

188 people liked it

"Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream"
— Jack Kerouac

133 people liked it

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

tags: dharma, simplicity, writing
278 people liked it

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