Choke - Chuck Palahniuk

People will jump through hoops if you just make them feel like a god.

The first time for everything. The incomplete inventory of my crimes. Just another incomplete in my life full of incompletes.

Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit. And I'm dragging Paige down the hallway.
We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. It's just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There's just decisions and disease and death.

Women don't want equal rights. They have more power being oppressed. They need men to be the vast enemy conspiracy. Their whole identity is based on it.

Sex addicts are really addicted to the endorphins, not the sex. Sex addicts have lower natural levels of monoamine oxidase. Sex addicts really crave the peptide phenylethylamine that might be triggered by danger, by infatuation, by risk and fear.

Sitting in traffic, my heart would beat at regular speed. I'm not alone. Trapped there, I could just be a normal person headed home to a wife, kids, a house. I could pretend that my life was more than just waiting for the next disaster. That I knew how to function. The way other kids would "play house," I could play commuter.

"It's pathetic," Paige says, "how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How if we can't explain something we'll just deny it."

A squirrel is someone who chews her food and then forgets what to do next. They forget how to swallow. Instead, she spits each chewed mouthful in her dress pocket. Or in her handbag. This is less cute than it sounds.

The past, the future, life on other planets, everything is such an extension, such a projection of life as we know it.

Art never comes from happiness.

Painting a picture, composing an opera, that's just something you do until you find the next willing piece of ass.

Someday it will be a doctor saving people. Returning them to happiness. Or something better than happiness: peace.
It'll be respected.
Someday.

I mean, what could ever be better than sex?
For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose... watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh.
I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, guthosing orgasm.
Painting a picture, composing an opera, that's just something you do until you find the next willing piece of ass.

It's okay if there isn't a God anymore, but I still want to respect something. I don't want to be the center of my own universe.

"We've taken the world apart," she says, "but we have no idea what to do with the pieces..."

This person will be proud of you because you make them so proud of themselves.