Moving Posts…Sort Of: Lines from A Book

I started some sort of Mother’s Day post, but Um was on Gtalk, so…go figure.

I ended up on my old blog, looking for posts that I can move. I was surprised to find that none of my old posts fit this blog’s theme. I realized how so much of a non-conformist I am. LOL. I am so not the typical woman who blogs about typical woman issues (until now).

Anyway…I am moving some of my favorite lines from Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary.

(I read too much of his work. Maybe that’s why I think this way. LOL)

- The point is, when you’re a kid, even when you’re a little older, maybe twenty and enrolled in art school, you don’t know anything about the real world. You want to believe somebody when he says he loves you. He only wants to marry you and take you home to live in some perfect island paradise. A big stone house on East Birch Street. Then he says he only wants to make you happy.

- Still, the better she could draw, the worse her life got–until nothing in her real world was good enough. It got until she didn’t belong anywhere. It got so nobody was good enough, refined enough, real enough. Not the boys in high school. Not the other girls. Nothing was as real as her imagined world.

- ….It wasn’t a career as an artist that she wanted. What she really wanted, all along, was the house, the family, the peace.

- Where every day doesn’t start with an alarm clock and end with the television.

- …”choose any book at the library.” Somebody’s homemade immortality. Their lasting effect. This is their life after death.

- Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.

- Everyone’s in their own personal coma.

- You have endless ways to commit suicide without dying dying.

- If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.

- Everybody was looking for some scientific method to produce miracles on demand….An endless way to repeat the accidental. An assembly line to plan and manufacture the spontaneous.

- With all our excellent skills, we have nothing special to document.

- Theory of self-expression–the paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell.

- What you don’t learn in art theory is how too big a compliment can hurt more than a slap in the face.

- Everything is nothing in itself.

- You’re always haunted by the idea you’re wasting your life.

- Wrecking a place is the only way to save it.

- It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scars to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

- How the viewer controls the view. How the artist is dead. We see what we want. We see how we want. We only see ourselves. All the artist can do is give us something to look at.

- Every person has the right to live where they can afford. We’re entitled to pursue happiness wherever we can drive to, fly to, rail to, to hunt it down.

- Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. No investment is yours forever….The money was already running out. One generation makes the money…the next generation protects the money. The third runs out of it. People always forget what it takes to build a family fortune.