Choke - Chuck Palahniuk

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

Why I do this is to put adventure back into people's lives.

That if enough people loved you, you'd stop needing love.

"How did you decide to become a doctor?"
Paige shrugs.
"You have to trade your youth for something. ..."

And if you don't see somebody every day, you see them change.

I'm trying to work some little miracles so I can build up to the big stuff.

This is the twelve-step world of sexual addiction. Compulsive sexual behavior. Every night of the week, they meet in the back room of some church. In some community center conference room. Every night, in every city. You even have virtual meetings on the Internet.

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.

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

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

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

"You know the old phrase 'Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it'? Well, I think those who remember their past are even worse off."

This way you can go back and review the worst of your life any time you want. Because supposedly, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.

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.

My life makes about as much sense as a Zen koan.