This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.
This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.
One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer... Maybe self-destruction is the answer.
At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
...both of us knowing we'd gotten somewhere we'd never been and like the cat and mouse in cartoons, we were still alive and wanted to see how far we could take this thing and still be alive.
The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing so she won't commit to anything.
Tyler says I'm nowhere near hitting the bottom, yet. And if I don't fall all the way, I can't be saved... I should run from self-improvement, and I should be running toward disaster.
Only after disaster can we be ressurected. "It's only after you've lost everything," Tyler says, "that you're free to do anything."
"Because everything up to now is a story," Tyler says, "and everything after now is a story." This is the greatest moment of our life.
There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.
Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't.
Nothing is static. Everything is falling apart.
... and I was in a mood to destroy something beautiful.
I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have.
I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.
...and it's not clear if reality slipped into my dream or if my dream is slopping over into reality.
The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.
If you can wake up in a different place. If you can wake up in a different time. Why can't you wake up as a different person?
That old saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.
How everything you ever love will reject or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.
This was better than real life. And your one perfect moment won't last forever. Everything in heaven is white on white. Faker. Everything in heaven is quiet, rubber-soled shoes. I can sleep in heaven. People write to me in heaven and tell me I'm remembered. That I'm their hero. I'll get better.
People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
I can see something is different about the girl. It's something European. Something malnourished. It isn't the daily recommended allowance of food and sunshine that make you beautiful by any North American standard.
Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.
It's music as wallpaper, utilitarian, music as Prozac or Xanax to control how you feel.
The music comes out the speaker weak and echoes off the stone until it's moving back and forth in drafts in currents, notes and chords around us. And we're dancing.
The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this.
...you can't belive you're the slave to this body... you can't believe we haven't invented something better. Something not so needy. Not so time consuming.
You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world.
You're going to lose it anyway. Your body. You're already losing it. It's time you bet everything.
Imagine how you'd feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn't stand.
The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.
Reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better.
Shot gunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer desk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world.
Some famous fashion photographer telling me how to feel. Him yelling, Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash.
Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.
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 someday.
Most women know this feeling of being more invisible everyday.
But hysteria is impossible without an audience. Pancking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.
The thin and eternal goddess that she is, Brandy's picture smiles up at me over a sea of painkillers. This is how I met Brandy Alexander. This is how I found the stength not to get on with my former life. This is how I found the courage not to pick up the same old pieces.
...the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
We'll be remember more for what we destroy than what we create.
When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.
"You can live a completely normal, regular life." she says. You just can't let anybody get close enough to you to learn the truth.
"You're a product of our language," Brandy says, "and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you," she says. "Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can concieve of is fine because you can concieve of it."
"The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger."
Brandy says, "Don't you see? Because we're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes." ... "I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life." Like Christopher Columbus sailing toward disaster at the edge of the world.
We're so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we're trained to want.
What I hate about [her] is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.
It takes more effort to hate [her] than it used to. My whole life is moving farther away from any reason to hate her. It's moving far away from reason itself. It takes a cup of coffee and a Dexedrine capsule to feel even vaguely pissed about anything.
Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definately that goes for everybody in the world.