Choke

That if enough people loved you, you'd stop needing love.

"You don't think I'm really a secretly sensitive and Christlike manifestation of perfect love?"
"No way, dude," Denny says. "You're an asshole."
And I say, "Thanks. Just checking."

"We don't live in the real world anymore," she said. "We live in a world of symbols."

I'm trying to work some little miracles so I can build up to the big stuff.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are.
Letting our past decide our future.
Or we can decide for ourselves.

How torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.

Sometimes a euphemism is more true than what it's supposed to hide.

The point was, it's not the sex part of pornography that hooked the stupid little boy. It was the confidence. The courage. The complete lack of shame. The comfort and genuine honesty. The up-front-ness of being able to just stand there and tell the world: Yeah, this is how I chose to spend a free afternoon. Posing here with a monkey putting chestnuts up my ass.
And I really don't care how I look. Or what you think.
So deal with it.
He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.

“My generation, all of our making fun of things isn't making the world any better.” she says. “We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.”

And the Mommy says how the girl traced the outline of her lover's shadow so she would always have a record of how he looked, a document of this exact moment, the last moment they would be together.

"I don't want you to just accept the world as it's given," she said.
She said, "I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that."
The boy had a pen now, and she said to draw the river in the book. Draw the river, and draw the mountains up ahead. And name them, she said. Not with words he already knew, but to make up new words that didn't already mean a bunch of other stuff.

"The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight."
Caged inside too many laws.
By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn't real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

The magic of sex is it's acquisition without the burden of possessions. No matter how many women you take home, there's never a storage problem.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

In the gold wash of the chapel, breathing her reasons into my ear, she asked, every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?