Choke

by Chuck Palahniuk

We’re all here. Alive and unwell.

Then she turns on the television, some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.

I write reminders to myself. Every day: Wear sunblock. Cover your gray. Don’t go insane. Eat less fats and sugars. Do more sit-ups. Don’t start forgetting stuff. Trim the hair in your ears. Take calcium. Moisturize. Every day. Freeze time to stay in one place forever. Do not get frigging old.

You save people by letting them save you.

That’s pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention.

someday, I’d like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know?”

“By the time you’re thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.”

“Griping isn’t the same as creating something,” my mom’s voice-over says. “Rebelling isn’t rebuilding. Ridiculing isn’t replacing … ”

I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn’t born, he’s made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

Even if the shoe doesn’t fit, you’ll shrink into it.

because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.

Every addiction, she said, was just a way to treat this same problem. Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.

Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won’t get any better.

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.

your memories, your stories and adventures, will be the only things you’ll have left.

“We are teaching our children to be helpless.”

“You don’t need a permit to have a baby. So why do you need to buy permission to build a house?”

It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it’s for sure unexplainable. Even God.

Because once you’ve crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them.”

“This is about a process. This isn’t about getting something done.”

There’s no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can’t re-create what’s over.

there’s no escaping from constant escape.