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On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.
I’ll keep the secret intact. It’s simple arithmetic. It’s a story problem. If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall? You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall. If X is greater than the cost of a
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The cabin hangs at the wrong angle under the roar of the turbines, and you will never have to file another expense account claim. Receipt required for items over twenty-five dollars. You will never have to get another haircut.
Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
“If you don’t know what you want,” the doorman said, “you end up with a lot you don’t.”
maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains.
My parents never said anything you’d want to embroider on a cushion.
“You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger.”
Besides, I’m enlightened now. You know, only Buddha-style behavior. Spider chrysanthemums. The Diamond Sutra and the Blue Cliff Record. Hari Rama, you know, Krishna, Krishna. You know, Enlightened.
“Sticking feathers up your butt,” Tyler says, “does not make you a chicken.”
“It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Tyler says, “that you’re free to do anything.”
The miles of night between Marla and me offer insects and melanomas and flesh-eating viruses.
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.
“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”
Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need.
“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.”
“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.”
The nouvelle cuisine of anarchy.
