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Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale? .Chuck Palahniuk
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The big reason why folks leave a small town, ' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.' Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.Chuck Palahniuk
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If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture.Chuck Palahniuk
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What if reality is nothing but some disease?Chuck Palahniuk
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Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people.Chuck Palahniuk
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The only way that America can protect its prosperity and political stability will be to depopulate the Third World? Should we be surprised that the AIDS virus showed up about 1975? Do you understand what the term "depopulate" means?Chuck Palahniuk
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Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you’d been reading.Chuck Palahniuk
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If you never been rabid, you ain't never lived.Chuck Palahniuk
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The future you have, tomorrow, won't be the same future you had, yesterday.Chuck Palahniuk
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By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior. Each of those three traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped-up tests to build a child's faith and imagination. The first test is to believe in a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust in a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: To believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money. From a man to an animal to a fairy. From toys to candy to money. Thus, interestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairy-dom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickels.. dimes.. and quarters. In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as he or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency. .Chuck Palahniuk
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By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember.Chuck Palahniuk
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Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. 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.Chuck Palahniuk
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Everyone wants to feel special - attain a special status among their pears- but not too special. Most kids want to be special the same way their friends areChuck Palahniuk