Haunted - Chuck Palahniuk

She says, “We’re all. . . some kind of genius. “Just,” she says, “some of us in other ways.”

Looking back, it was Mr. Whittier’s stand that we’re always right.
“It’s not a matter of right and wrong,” Mr. Whittier would say.
Really, there is no wrong. Not in our own minds. Our own reality.
You can never set off to do thewrongthing.
You can never say thewrongthing.
In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take—what you do or say or how you choose to appear—is automatically right the moment you act.
His hand shaking as he lifts his cup, Mr. Whittier says, “Even if you were to tell yourself, ‘Today, I’m going to drink coffee thewrongway. . . from a dirty boot.’
Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot.” Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right.
Even when you say, “I’m such an idiot, I’m so wrong. . .” you’re right. You’re right about being wrong. You’re right even when you’re an idiot. “No matter how stupid your idea,” Mr. Whittier would say, “you’re doomed to be right because it’s yours.”

“Our humanity isn’t measured by how we treat other people,” the Missing Link says. Fingering the layer of cat hair on his coat sleeve, he says, “Our humanity is measured by how we treat animals.” He looks at Sister Vigilante, who looks at her wristwatch. In a world where human rights are greater than at any time in history. . . in a world where the overall standard of living is at a peak. . . in a culture where each person is held responsible for
their life—here, the Missing Link says, animals are fast becoming the last real victims. The only slaves and prey. “Animals,” the Missing Link says, “are how we define humans.” Without animals, there would be no humanity. In a world of just people, people will mean nothing...

“Any call for world peace,” Mr. Whittier would say, “is a lie. A pretty, pretty lie.” Just another excuse to fight. No, we love war. War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment.
“It’s the mark of a very, very young soul,” Mr. Whittier used to say, “to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.”
We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we’re here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers. We love terrorists.
Hijackers. Dictators. Pedophiles.
God, how we love the television news. The pictures of people lining up beside a long, open grave, waiting to be shot by another new firing squad. The glossy newsmagazine photos of more everyday people torn to bloody shreds by suicide bombers. The radio bulletins about freeway pile-ups. The mud slides. The sinking ships. His quivering hands telegraphing the air, Mr. Whittier would say,
“We love when airplanes crash.”
We adore pollution. Acid rain. Global warming. Famine.
No, Mr. Whittier had no idea...

“The same mistakes we made as cavemen,” says Mr. Whittier, “we still make.” So maybe we’re supposed to fight and hate and torture each other...

We always do this, Mr. Whittier says. For the same reason our children’s children’s children’s children will always have war and famine and disease. Because we love our pain. We love our drama. But we will never, ever admit that.

It’s nothing personal when bombs explode.

“To become a household word,” says Chef Assassin, “all you need is a rifle.”

No one’s easier to ignore than the homeless. You could be Jane Fonda or Robert Redford, but if you’re pushing a shopping cart down the avenue at high noon, wearing three layers of soiled clothing and muttering cusswords under your breath — nobody’s going to notice you.

Maybe suffering and misery is the point of life.
Consider that the earth is a processing plant, a factory.
Picture a tumbler used to polish rocks:
A rolling drum filled with water and sand.
Consider that your soul is dropped in as an ugly rock,
some raw material or a natural resource, crude oil, mineral ore.
And all conflict and pain is just the abrasive that rubs us,
polishes our souls, refines us, teaches and finishes us over lifetime after lifetime.
Then consider that you've chosen to jump in, again and again, knowing this suffering is your entire reason for coming to earth.

And Mr. Whittier said, “This is why Moses led the tribes of Israel into the desert. . .” Because those people had lived for generations as slaves. They’d learned to be helpless. To create a race of masters from a race of slaves, Mr. Whittier said, to teach a controlled group of people how to create their own lives, Moses had to be an asshole.

Animals, she says, a dog, it makes us human. Proof of our humanity. Other people, they just make us redundant. A dog or cat, a bird or a lizard, it makes us God.

The devil is dead. Long live the devil

Even today, if you predict the future or read the past from indicators not everyone can recognize... it’s the prison or the asylum you’ll eventually call home.
The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.

Hell, Miss Leroy says, there’s things you see happen worse than getting killed.

All day long, she says, our biggest enemy is other people. It’s people packed around us in traffic. People ahead of us in line at the supermarket. It’s the supermarket checkers who hate us for keeping them so busy. No, people didn’t want this killer to be another human being. But they wanted people to die.