Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

Again, Chuck Klosterman


"Cocaine culture contains the worst of everything: the worst conversations, the worst friendships, and the worst kind of unspeakable joy. But the instant you've received a powdery compliment from a stranger, entering cocaine culture becomes the goal of your entire evening. People who want cocaine will lie about anything; people will surrender integrity they never had to begin with. To get free cocaine, women will have sex with men they normally wouldn't dance with. Cocaine makes you more popular, but also less likable; cocaine makes you feel guilty in advance. When you snort cocaine, you consciously allow yourself to become foolish in hope of seeming cool, and that's the worst choice any smart person can make."

"It was like getting smashed in the throat with a 38-ounce Louisville Slugger."

"I want to write something that feels like an unsentimental dream."

"I miss her very much and I want to call her. But I'm afraid if I call her, she won't answer. And if she doesn't answer, I'll wonder why, and my unconscious conclusion will be that she must be having sex with someone else. That notion is unjustified, but it's what I always assume whenever a woman* I love doesn't pick up the phone." (*Blogger's note: In the 2006 First Scribner trade paperback edition of this book, it says "women." This is a typo.)

"My thoughts are unoriginal."

"I always assume anyone riding a motorcycle probably wants to die (and kind of deserves it if they do)."

"I have traditionally argued that rock criticism is always unimportant."

"..the country is really only interested in one thing: The sex lives of people who aren't them."

"We are always dying, all the time, That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It's a sequenced collection of individualized deaths."

"I'm too drunk to continue writing."

"I spent a year killing myself trying to make you love me, and it was a heart-breaking process."

"'You don't understand love or death, so you compensate by becoming inappropriately obsessed with both--and probably for the same exact reason. You're conflating unlike idioms in the hope that they will accidentally take on symbolic meaning.'"

"What's so disquieting to me is how this kind of life--a life of going to joyless keg parties and having intense temporary acquaintances and spending most of one's time in basements and tiny apartments and crappy rented houses with five bedrooms--was once my life completely (as it probably was for many people like me). Those were the only things I ever did."

"The whole episodes now strikes me as inappropriate and random and completely inexplicable. But that used to be my life, all the time. That used to be normalcy, and now that normalcy is completely over. Things like that will never happen to me again, even if I want them to. And I did not choose to stop living that life, nor did I try to continue living that life. I just didn't notice when it stopped."

"When separating the seeds out of marijuana or chopping up freshly purchased cocaine, you generally use the jewel case of a compact disc as the base of operations. Jewel cases were designed for this process."

"We were all pretty stupid in the good old days."

"In America, parties that are supposed to start at 9:00 P.M. actually start at 10:00 P.M. However, rock concerts that are supposed to start at 9:00 P.M. actually start at 9:45."

"The reason I can tell they're not dating is because he's being really, really nice to her."

"I've always been envious of friends who claim to have some kind of profound, erotized relationship with literature, because I don't feel that way at all. My apartment is filled with books, but I secretly suspect I hate reading; sometimes it feels like something I'm forever forcing myself to do (and for reasons I never quite understand)."

"I've told Lenore I loved her on seven occasions, but three times were in handwritten letters, three were in e-mails, and once was when I was drunk."

"It's like looking down from heaven and watching all the mortals majoring in philosophy."

"..I never just wanna get fucked up; I always want something else to happen while I'm doing it. Just being fucked up is never enough."

"'I would suggest not smoking marijuana at all until you get to college. It will destroy your ambition, and it will make you fat. And if you smoke it all the time, you'll eventually stop dreaming at night, so you'll always wake up tired.'"

"Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you. It's understanding the unreasonable."

"It had been a hard week of drinking in Spin City; I think Lucy Chance and I went to the bar on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and I'm pretty sure we stayed out past 3:00 A.M. on all three occasions. It was rather exhausting, and I really could have used a night off from trying to kill myself."

"We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy."

"..there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll mee maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there's still one more tier to all this; there is always some person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations witht his person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trusts wit this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real--but you create the context And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else."

"I'm still alive, but I feel myself dying, person by person by person by person."