Rant

The book is really nothing new, as far as Chuck Palahniuk is concerned: nihilism, religious confusion, a car crash motif. The form sets it apart, though, and it's crafted a lot better than, say, Choke. Or Haunted for that matter.

"'We won't never be as young as we is tonight.'"

"Times like that, you look like a failed experiment your parents will have to face for the rest of their lives. A booby prize. And your mom and dad, they look like a God too retarded to fashion anything better than you.
You grow up to become living proof of your parent's limitations. Their less-than masterpiece."

"My take is you're not born loving nobody. Love is a skill you learn."
"You can get plenty of folks telling the same lie if they got a stake in it. You get everybody telling the same lie and it ain't a lie, not no more."

"Folks will really sell you anything for the right price."
"Things in life is either flesh of money, like they can't be both at the same time. That would be like somebody being both alive and dead. You can't. You got to choose."

"He was more like, he was trying to find something real in the world."

"Not everybody enjoys baseball or even fishing, but every person is obsessed with himself."

"After a good-looking boy gives you rabies two, three times, you'll settle down and marry somebody less exciting for the rest of your life."

"Get real. Most guys are keeping score with every lap of their tongue. Every time they come up for air, they're clocking your pleasure. And, lick for lick, you know this had better balance out with the pleasure you give them back. So, lick after lick, you never can relax and get off, not when you know that meter is always running. Every lick is an investment in getting licked back.
Even guys who hate bookkeeping and doing their taxes, guys who could only shrug if you asked their savings-account or credit-card balance, they'll compute the exact number of laps their tongue's done around your snatch. And the paycheck they have coming. The sexual equivalent of clock watchers or bean counters."

"Here's a single girl's secret--the reason you eat dinner with a man on a first date is so you know how he's going to fuck you. A slob who gobbles down the meal, never looks at a bite, you know not to crawl into bed with that guy."

"Even naked, we were never touching. Dried sticky or wet slimy, between his skin and mine, you could always feel a thin layer of sweat or spit or sperm."

"This here, Rant says, is the fact that starts a new future. Or a brand-new past. Or both."

"Your average city's nothing except different levels of pervert."

"But inside me, in secret, I know that thesis didn't wreck my life. Not by much. Even saddled with a hundred grand in student loans to pay, I can't get too upset. I learned something, maybe not about boosting peaks, but about people."

"...at least it's a communal boredom. Like a family."

"The greatest concensus in modern society is our traffic system. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy."

"No bullshit, but I never leave the hosue without a mix for anything: Falling in love. Witnessing a death. Disappointment. Impatience. Traffic. I carry a mix for any human condition. Anything really good or bad happens to me, and my way to not overreact--like, to distance my emotions--is to locate the exact perfect soundtrack for that moment."

"Rant goes, 'Really truly with her whole entire heart, does Echo hate somebody?'
I go, doesn't Rant mean 'love'?
And Rant shrugs and says, 'Ain't it the same thing?'"

"No matter how diligently you keep something a secret--accidents do happen."

"Or was I some erotic fantasy? Was sex too boring with normal girls, people with two arms and legs that matched, mouths that could kiss back? Was fucking me some one-time goal in the great scavenger hunt of his sex life?"

"It doesn't matter for crap that you've got three years of sobriety or that you finally look good in a two-piece bathing suit or you've met that perfect someone and you've fallen deeply, wildly, passionately in love. Today, as you pick up your dry cleaning, fax those reports, fold your laundry, or wash the dinner dishes, something you'd never expect is already stalking you."

"Here's one night when I control the chaos. I participate with the doom I can't control. I'm dancing with the inevitable, and I survive.
My regular little dress rehearsal."

"Me and Death, separated at birth."

"But anytime Rant had an orgasm, or the moment after we'd been rammed by another team, right when he blinked his eyes and seemed to realize he wasn't dead, he'd smile and say the same thing. At that moment, Rant would always smile, all dopey, and say, 'This is what church should feel like...'"

"'...What if reality is nothing but some disease?'"

"Always remember: The person asking the questions is the person in control."

"What's the longest you ever counted your heartbeat?"

"They expect life to be one big party. Their lives revolve around sex. Crashing their cars, and meaningless one-day stands with strangers. Our minister devoted one entire sermon to describing their lifestyle. It gets hard to feel sympathy for people so reckless with their own health. These so-call victims are people who don't respect themselves. Or God."

"'No matter what happens, it's always now...'"

"'The future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday.'"

"...she was pretty the way folks you love are pretty in old snapshots. When they're still young and excited about life. Before time and work and you have destroyed their youth."

"In a world where billions of people believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display."

"You see, life only turns out good or bad for only a little bit. And then it turns out some other way."

"'Nothing says you have to swallow this,' Rant told me. 'You can always just die.'"

"And all these ways I change the past--I don't even know I'm doing most of them. You could say I constantly fuck up the past, the present, and the future."

"You see how fast reality fades away?"