Invisible Monsters

You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody.

We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

The future is just wasted on some people.

I wanted to give up the idea I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.

The truth is I was addicted to being beautiful, and that's not something you just walk away from. Being addicted to all that attention, I had to quit cold turkey.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another.

Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.

You're safe because you're trapped inside your culture.

It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't love.

People all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

Sometimes the best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize.

When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.

You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.

What I wanted looked more and more like what I'd always been trained to want.

The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way a gun is power.

Our real discoveries come from chaos.

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.

This makeover would make piercings and tattoos and brandings look so lame, all those little fashion revolts so safe that they themselves only became fashionable. Those little paper tiger attempts to reject looking good that only end up reinforcing it.

When you go out with a drunk, you'll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you're drinking, drinking is okay. Two's company. Drinking is fun. If there's a bottle, even if your glass isn't empty, he'll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own.

Don't you think that somehow television makes us God?

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.

Do the things that scare you the most.

"And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap."

I wanted the everyday reassurance of being mutilated. The way a crippled deformed birth-defected disfigured girl can drive her car with the windows open and not care how the wind makes her hair look, that's the kind of freedom I was after.

The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill.

Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited.

Mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.

"Whatever you're thinking, a million other folks are thinking. whatever you do, they're doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort."

"Now," those Plumbago lips say, "You are going to tell me your story like you just did. Write it all down. Tell that story over and over. Tell me your sad-assed story all night." That Brandy queen points a long bony finger at me. "When you understand," Brandy says, "that what your telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."

Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definitely that goes for everybody in the world.

The truth is, being ugly isn't the thrill you'd think, but it can be an opportunity for something better than I ever imagined.

"[W]e're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes" Brandy says, "I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life."

People just can't stand not knowing something, she says. Especially men can't stand not climbing every mountain, mapping everywhere. Labeling everything. Peeing on every tree and then never calling you back.

Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?

What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock-tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?

Seth says how your being born makes your parents god. you owe them your life, and they can control you.

Evie says that beautiful people should never date each other. Together, they just don't generate enough attention. Evie says there's a whole shift in the beauty standard when they're together. You can feel this, Evie says. When both of you are beautiful, neither of you is beautiful. Together, as a couple, you're less than the sum of your parts.

Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

The murderer, the victim, the witness, each of us thinks our role is the lead.

"She has to take a needle and thread and sew herself up" ".. The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open"

Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anyone in the world. We're all such products.

Your folks are like God because you want to know they're out there and you want them to approve of your life, still you only call them when you're in crisis and need something.

"First," Manus says, "your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life."

"The whole time, growing up," Evie says, "I just thought being a woman would be...not such a disappointment."

When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

This is the world we live in. Conditions change and we mutate.

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.