Chamath Palihapitiya
- The Evils of Social Media As Experience by the Mindless Masses
We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection, because we get rewarded in these short-term signals - hearts, likes, thumbs up - and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth. And instead, what it is is fake, brittle popularity that's short-term and leaves you even more, admit it, vacant and empty before you did it. Think about that, compounded by 2 billion people.
Margaret Atwood
- The Handmaid's Tale
My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it's forbidden. I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that's survived from an unimaginably distant past.
Margaret Atwood
- The Handmaid's Tale
I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said her to once. I want her back. I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.
Margaret Atwood
- The Handmaid's Tale
I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but every woman knew: Don't open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don't stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don't turn to look. Don't go into a laundromat, by yourself, at night.
Kurt Vonnegut
- Breakfast of Champions
The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
Kurt Vonnegut
- Player Piano
Don't you see, Doctor? The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don't apply anymore. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.
Philip Roth
- Operation Shylock: A Confession
People try to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be otherwise. So as not to look as they look, sound as they sound, be treated as they are treated, suffer in the ways they suffer. They change hairdos, tailors, spouses, friends, they change their addresses, their noses, their wallpaper, even their forms of government, all to be more like themselves or less like themselves, or more like or less like that exemplary prototype whose image is theirs to emulate or to repudiate.
Jack Handey
- Deep Thoughts
I'll never forget the time we were at the beach and we buried Uncle Joe in the sand. Boy, did we get in trouble! In fact, we got arrested. It turns out you can't bury people at the beach. Only at the cemetery.
Ali Wong
- On Stopping Nursing
I had to stop breastfeeding after eight and a half months. I could not take it anymore. By the end, I felt like 'The Giving Tree.' I used to not understand what that depressing-ass book was about. And now I know it's about breastfeeding! It's about a mom who used to have all of these beautiful branches and apples, and then this little freeloader comes into her life, takes all of her sh*t, and then she just becomes a sad-ass tree stump with deflated titties!
Jack Handey
- Deep Thoughts
My young son asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the truth - that most of us go to Hell and burn eternally - but I didn't want to upset him.
Philip Roth
- Patrimony
We're the sons appalled by violence, with no capacity for inflicting physical pain, unfit to pulverize even the most deserving enemy. We have teeth as the cannibals do, imbedded in our jaws, the better to help us articulate. When we lay waste, it isn't with raging fists or ruthless schemes or insane sprawling violence but with our words, our brains, with mentality, with all the stuff that produced the poignant abyss between our fathers and us and that they themselves broke their backs to give us.
Christopher Moore
- Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
Doing what he wanted to do and his boundless affinity for everything made Clay Demodocus a happy guy, but he was also shrewd enough not to be too open about his happiness. Animals might put up with that smiley shit, but people will eventually kill you for it.
Chuck Palahniuk
- Burnt Tongues
I liked it better when you couldn't be so sure. When terrifying rumors were distant enough to be a UFO at the bottom of Loch Ness. When the horribly compelling train-wreck tragedies of less fortunate people's lives were only as real as you let them be. Just a cover of a magazine, a black-and-white photo on some late-night commercial for a charity. Now confirmation is just a mouse click away.
Christopher Moore
- Noir
Be careful not to ogle her wares, as dames often do not care for that, even when it is evident that they have spent no little time and effort preparing their wares for ogling.
Chuck Palahniuk
- Fight Club
We wanted to blast the world free of history. Picture yourself planting radishes and potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course. You'll hunt elk through canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. And every evening what's left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against the bears and wolves that watch us from outside the cage bars.
Mark Manson
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (edited to fit)
For people to feel justified in doing horrible things to other people, they must feel an unwavering certainty in their own righteousness and beliefs. Racists do racist things because they're certain of their genetic superiority. Religious fanatics blow themselves up and murder dozens of people because they're certain of their place in heaven as martyrs. Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone else is evil.
Mark Manson
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
There's a bluntness to Russian culture that generally rubs Westerners the wrong way. Gone are the fake niceties and verbal webs of politeness. You don't smile at strangers or pretend to like anything you don't. In Russia, if something is stupid, you say it's stupid. If someone is being an assh*le, you tell him he's being an assh*le.
Chuck Palahniuk
- Choke
I fought against everything, but I worry that I was never for anything. I can criticize and judge everything, but what does that get me? Griping isn't the same as creating something. Rebelling isn't rebuilding. Ridiculing isn't replacing. We've taken the world apart, but we have no idea what to do with the pieces. My generation, all of our making fun of things isn't making the world any better. We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very little of our own.
Chuck Palahniuk
- Survivor
You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. We can't give up our concept of who we were. All those adults playing archaeologist at yard sales, looking for childhood artifacts, board games, CandyLand, Twister, they're terrified. Trash becomes holy relics. Mystery Date. Hula Hoops. Our way of getting nostalgic for what we just threw in the trash, it's all because we're afraid to evolve. Grow, change, lose weight, re-invent ourselves. Adapt.
Chuck Palahniuk
- Damned
Anyone who's ever flown seated next to a fussy baby, you'll no doubt fall right into the swing of things in Hell. What with the strangers and crowding and seemingly endless hours of waiting for nothing to happen. Especially if your in-flight movie was The English Patient. In Hell, whenever the demons announce they're going to treat everyone to a big-name Hollywood movie, don't get too excited because it's always The English Patient, or, unfortunately, The Piano. It's never The Breakfast Club.
