Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread

by Chuck Palahniuk

But love…I mean you have to love your old man. I mean, after you’re born it’s not like you get a choice.

Griffin Wilson, he knew that the SATs were just the gateway to a big lifetime of bullshit. To getting married and college. To paying taxes and trying to raise a kid who’s not a school shooter. And Griffin Wilson knew drugs are only a patch. After drugs, you’re always going to need more drugs.

what he really wanted to be was happy. Not just not-sad, he wanted to be happy the way a dog is happy.

The newspaper won’t report the actual numbers. Newspapers flatter themselves.

“Actual Happiness Only Happens by Accident”

No offense to Jesus, but the meek won’t inherit the earth. To judge from reality TV the loudmouths will get their hands on everything.

To be or not to be. God’s greatest gift to animals is they don’t get a choice.

Most people, instead of saving me, they pull out their telephones and start shooting video.

It sounds trite, but only because words make everything true sound trite. Because words always screw up whatever you’re trying to say.

Loving an animal, a horse, cat, or dog, was always a romantic tragedy. It meant loving something that would die before you. Like that movie with Ali MacGraw. There was no future, just the affection of the present moment. You didn’t expect a big payoff, someday.

everybody looks a little crazy if you’re looking close enough, and if you can’t look that close then you don’t really love them. All the while life goes around, and it goes around. And if you keep waiting for somebody perfect you’ll never find love, because it’s how much you love them is what makes them perfect.

the essence of sexual attraction was availability.

He knew that marriage was like one of those movies where the only exciting parts are all squeezed into the three-minute preview.

The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid.

The essence of being a parent was the shift from being the person who is watched to being the person who does the watching.

There were lies that married people more effectively than any wedding vows.

Every age embraces some fashion trend that looks ridiculous from any other point in history.

As a young man, he’d been an idealist in a corrupt world. It was no surprise that he’d turned out equally as corrupt, just a new and different form of corrupt. That might be the best any generation could achieve: to pioneer its own brand of corruption.

If numbers could explain the physical world, words would explain the invisible one. Felix had staked his life on it. And if history remembered him as an idiot, well, he was only one among billions of people. History could spare one man. All men are doomed to spend most of their existence among the dead.

For men cannot know each other’s hearts, not while they’re of sound mind. Standardized words are more handicap than help. Neither are gestures any use. It is only after the intellect collapses that any true communication exists.

By the time you turn thirty, your life is about escaping the person you’ve become in order to escape the person you’ve become in order to escape the person you started as.

the nature of happiness is that we only recognize it after the fact.