Choke - Chuck Palahniuk

...it's amazing what a woman will read into it if you by accident say, I love you. Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this.

Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace.

Somebody saves your life, and they'll love you forever.

IF YOU'RE GOING TO READ THIS, DON'T BOTHER.
After a couple pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece.
Save yourself.
There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair.
You're not getting any younger.
What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse.

It's that old Chinese custom where if somebody saves your life, they're responsible for you forever. It's as if now you're their child.

The Titanic thing, I did that.
That Kennedy assassination deal, yeah, that was me.
The big World War II gizmo, that atom bomb contraption, well guess what? That was my doing.
The AIDS bug? Sorry. Me, again.

And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody.

It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.

Please, just show me one thing in this world that is what you'd think.

You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you.
All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog.

I just want one person I can rescue. I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.

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.

When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

"And I tinted my hair," she says. With one hand, she reaches back for a few strands and holds them out near me, rubbing them between two fingers.
"It's black now," she says.
"I figured it's safer," she says, "since you told me blondes have the highest amount of skin cancer."

This is even after the Easter Bunny turned out to be a lie. Even after Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and Saint Christopher and Newtonian physics and the Niels Bohr model of the atom, this stupid, stupid kid still believed the Mommy.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.