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Originally Posted by sickbadthing
A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
Chuck Palahniuk
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
Chuck Palahniuk
Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
Chuck Palahniuk
Every woman is just a different kind of problem.
Chuck Palahniuk
Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
Chuck Palahniuk
Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.
Chuck Palahniuk
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
Chuck Palahniuk
Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
Chuck Palahniuk
I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears.
Chuck Palahniuk
I just don't want to die without a few scars.
Chuck Palahniuk
I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.
Chuck Palahniuk
I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.
Chuck Palahniuk
If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?
Chuck Palahniuk
If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.
Chuck Palahniuk
If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
Chuck Palahniuk
If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.
Chuck Palahniuk
It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget.
Chuck Palahniuk
Masochism is a valuable job skill.
Chuck Palahniuk
Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.
Chuck Palahniuk
Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
Chuck Palahniuk
More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.
Chuck Palahniuk
No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
Chuck Palahniuk
Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.
Chuck Palahniuk
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
Chuck Palahniuk
People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
Chuck Palahniuk
People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.
Chuck Palahniuk
People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.
Chuck Palahniuk
Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.
Chuck Palahniuk
Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished.
Chuck Palahniuk
Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.
Chuck Palahniuk
Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.
Chuck Palahniuk
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
Chuck Palahniuk
That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.
Chuck Palahniuk
The answer is there is no answer.
Chuck Palahniuk
The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.
Chuck Palahniuk
The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.
Chuck Palahniuk
The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.
Chuck Palahniuk
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
Chuck Palahniuk
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
Chuck Palahniuk
We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
Chuck Palahniuk
We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
Chuck Palahniuk
What we don't understand we can make mean anything.
Chuck Palahniuk
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?
Chuck Palahniuk
Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?
Chuck Palahniuk
Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying?
Chuck Palahniuk
You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.
Chuck Palahniuk
You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.
Chuck Palahniuk
You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.
Chuck Palahniuk
Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.
Chuck Palahniuk
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And she said, 'It's not too late; tell the world, tell the world what happened to her.' And I take her mandate to be the one that is in my heart, the one that I should follow.
Amy Tan
And so she was very proud, because she measured success in terms of money, which is what I started to do as well. My goal then, became to increase the amount of money that I made each month.
Amy Tan
And we have a Constitution, a tradition, a culture that supports that. I hope it continues to support that. I hope it especially continues to support the arts in that direction.
Amy Tan
At the time I was doing business writing, I also had a friend who introduced me to a fiction writer. My friend said that I could meet this woman and tell her how to make some real money.
Amy Tan
Certainly all of us have gone through fights with partners in our life, but that's not drawn from my relationships per se. But I know that I'm going to be subject to that assumption.
Amy Tan
For myself, it's very personal. So I have a hard time accepting what is said about my work when it's taken apart.
Amy Tan
Getting this story out, I realized, was a gift that she was giving me. And there was a gift I could give back to her, and it didn't matter what happened to that book afterwards.
Amy Tan
God, life changes faster than you think.
Amy Tan
I also grew up, thankfully, with a love of language. That may have happened because I was bilingual at an early age. I stopped speaking Chinese when I was five, but I loved words.
Amy Tan
I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
Amy Tan
I could already see how people were treating me differently. That's the scary thing.
Amy Tan
I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
Amy Tan
I did see all of those things, and even more. I discovered how American I was. I also discovered how Chinese I was by the kind of family habits and routines that were so familiar.
Amy Tan
I did some writing in class when I was young just as everybody did. I had to write little essays and things like that.
Amy Tan
I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.
Amy Tan
I didn't want to become a suspicious person. Those were the things that helped me decide what I was going to write.
Amy Tan
I discovered a sense of finally belonging to a period of history which I never felt with American history.
Amy Tan
I don't see myself, for example, writing about cultural dichotomies, but about human connections.
Amy Tan
I find it happening less here partly because people are more aware now of the flaws of political correctness - that literature has to do something to educate people.
Amy Tan
I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
Amy Tan
I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
Amy Tan
I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.
Amy Tan
I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.
Amy Tan
I remember all of my teachers. I think of them all as being very kind and dedicated. I remember one teacher in particular.
Amy Tan
I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.
Amy Tan
I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.
Amy Tan
I still did a lot of things out of anger for a while. I was lucky that I met a very kind person, a very good person and that person is now my husband. He is a very sweet man.
Amy Tan
I still have to think about that over and over again, with everything I do in life. It's so easy to get derailed by success.
Amy Tan
I think any mother worries about her daughter losing herself to some boy and ruining her life. So there was a mix of things.
Amy Tan
I think I was a gloomy kid. I was trying to behave, trying to be good. I really loved my father. He was my mentor in a way, so I wanted to please him a lot.
Amy Tan
I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.
Amy Tan
I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.
Amy Tan
I thought it would ruin things, because at that moment in my life I was fairly happy. I was getting along with my mother.
Amy Tan
I thought my life was over then, that all chances of ever going to college - of having a decent life, of being respected - were gone.
Amy Tan
I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.
Amy Tan
I wanted to bury it so that what I thought was the stronger, more independent, American side could come out.
Amy Tan
I wanted to see where she had lived, I wanted to see the family members that had raised her, the daughters she had left behind. The daughters could have been me, or I could have been them.
Amy Tan
I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.
Amy Tan
I was in a school in the third grade and they were thinking of skipping me, putting me in a higher grade. But then somebody said that would be bad psychologically.
Amy Tan
I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.
Amy Tan
I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.
Amy Tan
I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer.
Amy Tan
If you get this kind of review then you worry about what's going to happen with the next. So there's never any comfort point.
Amy Tan
In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
Amy Tan
In no other country do you have that opportunity. It's not to say that everything will happen fairly and the way that you want.
Amy Tan
It is that self-determination of your identity, to define what it means to be an American, and that nobody defines that for you.
Amy Tan
It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
Amy Tan
It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.
Amy Tan
It's hard to believe, but this feeling changes over time. So many people feel this way. It's normal to feel conflicted.
Amy Tan
It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that's unique for yourself.
Amy Tan
It's not simply material ones or environmental ones. I worry about ethical ones, moral ones, the kinds of compromises that are constantly being made for pragmatic reasons.
Amy Tan
It's very gothic to have a little boy killing a giant, somebody's head being served on a platter, dead people being raised out of the grave.
Amy Tan
Just be open to it and never let yourself despair that this is it.
Amy Tan
My books and my stories are about families, so why wouldn't I tell them the things that I thought were important to our family, that are in my books?
Amy Tan
My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.
Amy Tan
My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.
Amy Tan
My mother, meanwhile, all the time kept saying, 'Write my true story. That's all you have to do. Write my true story.' I kept saying, 'No, that's not fiction. I'm not writing biography.'
Amy Tan
My mother, though, got equally angry at the relative and said, 'For so many years, I carried this shame on my back, and my mother suffered, because she couldn't say anything to anybody.'
Amy Tan
My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the time I was in kindergarten.
Amy Tan
My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
Amy Tan
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
Amy Tan
People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.
Amy Tan
Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
Amy Tan
She hounded me until I wrote a couple more stories and then she sold that as a collection called The Joy Luck Club.
Amy Tan
She said 'I'm by commission. You don't have to pay anything until you sell anything.' I said, 'Well fine. You want to be my agent and not make anything.' I thought, 'Boy, is she dumb.'
Amy Tan
Some people are going to lose out, but there also might be some compromises made in the world.
Amy Tan
That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do.
Amy Tan
That's what I think life is like, too. I have the luxury to do exactly what it is we all need time to do, and that is just think about the mystery of life.
Amy Tan
The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.
Amy Tan
The hurdles and conflicts are really momentary. You get over them and you see what happens afterwards.
Amy Tan
There are a lot of people who think that's what's needed to be successful is always being right, always being careful, always picking the right path.
Amy Tan
They didn't know who I really was. They didn't know how much the smallest amount of recognition would have meant to me and how the smallest amount of criticism could undo me.
Amy Tan
They were daughters, also wanting their mother's approval, and didn't understand why their mother was so critical.
Amy Tan
This was a moment when I thought for sure my life was over. I think I understand kids who have made a few mistakes. They're relying on everybody else's opinion of who they are.
Amy Tan
To write the book, I had to put that aside. As with any book. I go through the anxiety, 'What will people think of me for writing something like this?'
Amy Tan
Ultimately, I have to write what I have to write about, including the question of life continuing beyond our ordinary senses.
Amy Tan
What you'll find ultimately is that this whole question of who you are is a very, very interesting question and having two cultures to add to the mix of it makes it even more interesting.
Amy Tan
When you read about the Civil War, a lot of people, like my husband, can say my great-great-grandfather fought in that war. We have the gun and all that kind of stuff.
Amy Tan
Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.
Amy Tan
With that sendoff into the world, I was determined to make it as a writer. I worked day and night trying to build my business, writing a business plan and thinking of how I could do this.
Amy Tan
Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.
Amy Tan
Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.
Amy Tan
You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.'
Amy Tan
You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.
Amy Tan