Maru > Maru's Quotes

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“As-tu déjà été amoureux? C'est horrible non? Ca rend si vulnérable. Ca t'ouvre la poitrine et le coeur en grand et du coup, n'importe qui peut venir te bousiller de l'intérieur. On se forge des défenses, on se fabrique une belle armure pour que rien ne puisse jamais nous atteindre, et voilà qu'un imbécile, pas bien différent des autres s'immisce dans notre imbécile de vie... On lui offre un morceau de soi alors que l'autre n'a rien demandé. Il a juste fait un truc débile un jour, genre t'embrasser ou te sourire, mais, depuis, ta vie ne t'appartient plus. L'amour te prend en otage. Il s'insinue en toi. Il te dévore de l'intérieur et te laisse tout seul à chialer dans le noir, au point qu'un simple phrase comme "je crois qu'on devrait rester amis" te fait l'effet d'un éclat de verre qu'on t'aurait planté dans le coeur. Ca fait mal. Pas juste dans ton imagination. Pas juste dans ta tête. C'est une douleur à fendre l'âme, qui s'incruste en toi et te déchire du dedans. Je hais l'amour.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.
This only looks like love.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger than Fiction

“I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything... I wish, just once, I could say, 'This. This is good enough. Just because I choose it.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“No, whether a woman is a concubine to fuck or a damsel to redeem, she's always just some passive object to fulfill a man's purpose.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Snuff

“I'm not straight, and I'm not gay. I'm not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you. Then puberty makes you Satan, just because you want something better.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Angel says that rich people don't like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Sobriety is okay enough," Denny says, "but someday, I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Most people would never admit it, but they'd been bitching since they were born. As soon as their head popped out into that bright delivery-room light, nothing had been right. Nothing had been as comfortable or felt so good. Just the effort it took to keep your stupid physical body alive, just finding food and cooking it and dishwashing, the keeping warm and bathing and sleeping, the walking and bowel movements and ingrown hairs, it was all getting to be too much work.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“Since the values of the market were the highest criteria, persons also became valued as commodities which could be bought and sold. A person's worth is then his salable market value, whether it is skill or 'personality' that is up for sale. [...]
The market value, then, becomes the individual's valuation of himself, so that self-confidence and 'self-feeling' (ones experience of identity with one's self) are largely reflections of what others think of one, in this case the 'others' being those who represent the market. Thus contemporary economic processes have contributed not only to an alienation of man from man, but likewise to 'self-alienation' - an alienation of the individual from himself. As Fromm very well summarizes the point:

Since modern man experiences himself both as the seller and as the commodity to be sold on the market, his self-esteem depends on conditions beyond his control. If he is 'successful,' he is valuable; if he is not, he is worthless. The degree of insecurity which results from this orientation can hardly be overestimated. If one feels that one's own value is not constituted primarily by the human qualities one possesses, but by one's succes on a competitive market with ever-changing conditions, one's self-esteem is bound to be shaky and in constant need of confirmation by others. [Erich Fromm, Man for himself]

In such a situation one is driven to strive relentlessly for 'succes'; this is the chief way to validate ones self and to allay anxiety. And any failure in the competitive struggle is a threat to the quasi-esteem for one's self - which, quasi though it be, is all one has in such a situation. This obviously leads to powerful feelings of helplessness and inferiority.
[p.169f]”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
― Neil Gaiman

“That’s pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our attention. Jacking off. Denial.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Mylife might be little and boring, but at least it’s mine - not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“Your past is just a story. And once you realize this it has no power over you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk