Emily > Emily's Quotes

“Have a nice, cuntlovin' day.”
― Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence

“I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I...”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”
― David Foster Wallace

“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it”
― David Foster Wallace

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
"Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“We'll never be as young as we are tonight.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.”
― Chuck Palahniuk , Invisible Monsters

“Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again.”
― Daniel Handler, Adverbs

“They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.”
― Daniel Handler, Adverbs

“It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.”
― Daniel Handler, Adverbs

“You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“Today was a difficult day. Tomorrow will be better”
― Kevin Henkes, Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse

“Moving from phonetics to etymology, ‘vagina’ originates from a word meaning sheath for a sword. Ain’t got no vagina.”
― Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence

“But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so
beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted