Chuck Palahniuk
- Lullaby
The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.
Chuck Palahniuk
- Damned
They told me that nothing was a sin, just a poor life choice. Poor impulse control. That nothing is evil. Any concept of right versus wrong, according to them, is merely a cultural construct relative to one specific time and place. They said that if anything should force us to modify our personal behavior it should be our allegiance to a social contract, not some vague, externally imposed threat of flaming punishment.
Chuck Palahniuk
- Damned
Nevertheless, if you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. A child allows us to revisit the excitement we once felt about, well, everything. A generation later, our grandkids bump up our enthusiasm yet again. Reproducing is a kind of booster shot to keep us loving life.
Philip Roth
- The Human Stain
There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It's more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you're in its grip, it's as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.
Philip Roth
- Portnoy's Complaint
For love? What love? Is that what binds all these couples we know together - the ones who even bother to let themselves be bound? Isn't it something more like weakness? Isn't it rather convenience and apathy and guilt? Isn't it rather fear and exhaustion and inertia, gutlessness plain and simple, far far more than that "love" that the marriage counselors, songwriters and psychotherapists are forever dreaming about? Please, let us not bullsh*t one another about "love" and its duration.
Ali Wong
- On balance
A lot of people like to ask me, 'Ali, how on earth do you balance family and career?' Men never get asked that question. Because they don't - but the standards for dads are so low that they get so much praise for doing so little. My husband occasionally changes diapers, and when people hear that, oh my God, confetti everywhere! When my baby girl was first born, I would do skin-on-skin contact every day to bond with her. She sh*t on my chest. Where's my confetti at?
Ali Wong
- On Nannies
I'll tell you how I balance family and career. Real talk? I have a nanny. That's it. That's the answer. Yes, it's very unlikable and unpopular to broadcast that because not everybody can afford a nanny, it's super-expensive. Both me and my husband have to hustle. We have to work very hard to not take care of our child ourselves.
Jack Handey
- Deep Thoughts
The people in the village were real poor, so none of the children had any toys. But this one little boy had gotten an old enema bag and filled it with rocks, and he would go around and whap the other children in the face with it. Man, I think my heart almost broke. Later the boy came up and offered to give me the toy. This was too much! I reached out my hand, but then he ran away. I chased him down and took the enema bag. He cried a little, but that's the way of these people.
Jack Handey
- Deep Thoughts
When I saw the old bum pushing his grocery cart down the street, at first I felt sorry for him. But then when I saw what was in his cart I thought well, no wonder you're a bum, look at the dumb things you bought.
Chuck Palahniuk
- Damned
According to Babette, 98.3 percent of lawyers end up in Hell. That's in contrast to the 23 percent of farmers who are eternally damned. Some 45 percent of retail business owners are hell-bound, and 85 percent of computer software writers. Perhaps a trace number of politicians ascend to Heaven, but statistically speaking, 100 percent of them are cast into the fiery pit, as are essentially 100 percent of journalists and redheads.
Mark Manson
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
Just as we look back in horror at the lives of people five hundred years ago, I imagine people five hundred years from now will laugh at us and our certainties today. They will laugh at how we let our money and our jobs define our lives. They will laugh at how we were afraid to show appreciation for those who matter to us most, yet heaped praise on public figures who didn't deserve anything. They will laugh at our rituals.
Mark Manson
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
Stress-related health issues, anxiety disorders, and cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past thirty years, despite the fact that everyone has a flat-screen TV and can have their groceries delivered. Our crisis is no longer material; it's existential, it's spiritual. We have so much f*cking stuff and so many opportunities that we don't even know what to give a f*ck about anymore.
Philip Roth
- Everyman
Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness - the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us.
Philip Roth
- I Married a Communist
Look, everything the Communists say about capitalism is true, and everything the capitalists say about Communism is true. The difference is, our system works because it's based on the truth about people's selfishness, and theirs doesn't because it's based on a fairy tale about people's brotherhood. It's such a crazy fairy tale they've got to take people and put them in Siberia in order to get them to believe it.
Philip Roth
- The Plot Against America
And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds?
Philip Roth
- The Human Stain
But the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop. I don't know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate. And that is saying something.
Philip Roth
- American Pastoral
That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way - and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration.
Philip Roth
- Sabbath's Theatre
As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.
Chuck Palahniuk
- Lullaby
Imagine immortality, where a marriage of fifty years feels like a one-night stand. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value. Imagine your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melodramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away.
Chuck Palahniuk
- Diary
Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history's in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.
