"You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work. "
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"When I see you, the World stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There's nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The World just stops, and it is a beautiful place, and there is only you."
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"...but better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of our time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. "
— Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer)

"history only existed in the human mind, subject to endless revision. 'each man kills the thing he loves'-Oscar Wilde. You kill it before it kills you, but he was wrong. you killed it by accident. thinking you were doing something else. shattering, when all you wanted to do was keep it safe."
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde

"Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."
— Oscar Wilde

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
— Oscar Wilde

"The world is a stage and the play is badly cast."
— Oscar Wilde

""The damaged loves the damaged""
— Chuck Palahniuk (Snuff)

"

'Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. And intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.'
"
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"It's such a liability to love another person."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing."
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"These people picked you up and played with you and then left you lying in the rain"
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word
The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with a sword"
— Oscar Wilde

"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost."
— Marcel Proust

"Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"All great and precious things are lonely."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"..it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel."
— East of Eden

"There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war."
— Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer)

"On the meridian of time, there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama."
— Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer)

"People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. "
— Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer)

"A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
Well, sweetheart, I tell her, yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"Reality means you live until you die...the real truth is nobody wants reality."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"You have a choice. Live or die.
Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just to controlling."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"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."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)

"Stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion of doubt. Happiness is never grand."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments what we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"I’m breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions, because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"When love exists, nothing else matters, not life’s predicaments, not the fury of the years, not a physical winding down or scarcity of opportunity."
— Isabel Allende

"Words are not that important when you recognize intentions."
— Isabel Allende (City of the Beasts)