"...Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but...life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four a.m."
— Wally Lamb

"Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love."
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

"I know it's a crock of shit. I ain't offering you happily-ever-after. I'm offering you... happily-maybe-sometimes-ever-after. Sort of. You know, with warts and shit." -Thayer"
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

"Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all."
— Wally Lamb

"This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you thought you were going."
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

"I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy."
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

""I wonder what my baby is thinking at this moment," he called, rubbing his stomach with his hands. What I was thinking about was whether or not his being my mother was going to wreck my nightly friction ritual."
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
— Sylvia Plath

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
— Chuck Palahniuk

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

"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)

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."
— Chuck Palahniuk

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

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

"...the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"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)

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

"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)

"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)

"Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against."
— Chuck Palahniuk

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

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

"...hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"...the girl's lover was gone, but his shadow was still there."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"It can only take a moment to waste the rest of your life."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Snuff)

"I'm sorry if this all seems a little rushed and desperate. It is."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories)

"Just for the record, waking up on drugs with your pubic hair shaved and something plastic stuck in your vagina doesn't necessarily make you a real artist."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"...an important part of building a new culture was allowing people to complain about their past. At first, the more they complained, the worse the past would seem. But by venting, people could start to resolve the past. By bitching and bitching and bitching, they could exhaust the drama of their own horror stories. Grow bored. Only then could they accept a new story for their lives. Move forward. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"everyone is in their own personal coma."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"“You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,” he says, “the same way this theater seems to digest people.” With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky and growing mold,
branched with arms and legs.
Other events—the ones you can’t digest—they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can’t talk about, they rot you from the inside out. Until you’re Cassandra’s wet shadow on the ground. Sunk in your own yellow protein mud.
But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell—you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good. Those are stories as important as food. Those are stories you can use to make people laugh or cry or sick. Or scared. To make people feel the way you felt. To help exhaust that past moment for them and for you. Until that moment is dead.
Consumed. Digested. Absorbed."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"More and more, it feels like I’m doing a really bad impersonation of myself."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"You gain power by pretending to be weak."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"Doesn't reincarnation strike you as just another form of procrastination?"
— Chuck Palahniuk

"We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future."
— Chaim Potok (Davita's Harp)

"Something that is yours forever is never precious"
— Chaim Potok (My Name Is Asher Lev)

"“I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.”
“Lurie, if the Torah cannot go out into your world of scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth.”"
— Chaim Potok (In the Beginning)

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
— Noam Chomsky

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
— Noam Chomsky

"If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world."
— Noam Chomsky

"All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume."
— Noam Chomsky

"Education is imposed ignorance."
— Noam Chomsky

"Love is so short, forgetting is so long."
— Pablo Neruda (Love: Ten Poems By Pablo Neruda)