"What you have to love about drinking is, every swallow is an irrevocable decision. You charging ahead, in control if the game. It’s the same with pills, sedatives and painkillers, every swallow us a first definite step down some road."

""It's not a matter of right and wrong," Mr. Whittier would say. Really, there is no wrong. Not in our minds. Our own reality. You can never set off to do the wrong thing. You can never say the wrong thing. In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take--what you do or say or how you choose to appear--is automatically right the moment you act."

"To create a race of masters from a race of slaves, Mr. Whittier said, to teach a controlled group of how to create their own lives, Moses had to be an asshole."

"People in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: esprit d'Escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer but it's too late. So you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So, under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party...As you start down the stairway, then - magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put down. That's the Spirit of the Stairway. The trouble is, even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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 it's time to reintroduce me to solid foods, their words again, it's pureed chicken and strained carrots. Baby foods. Everything mashed or pulverized or crushed. You are what you eat."

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

"Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. (ch3p32)"

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

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

"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."

"Somewhere in heaven, you're live on a video web site for God to surf."

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

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

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

"You have to keep recycling yourself."

"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"

"Rip yourself open. Sew yourself shut."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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 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."

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

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

"The nurse brings me the personal classified ads from a newsletter. Sister Katherine peers down her nose and through the glasses to read: Guys seeking slim, adventurous girls for fun and romance. And, yes, it's true, not one single guy specifically excludes hideous mutilated girls with growing medical bills."

"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."

"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."

"The world," Brandy says, "is your cradle and your trap."

"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."

"The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger."

"Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night."

"Evie starts telling me about an idea she has for a remake of Cinderella, only instead of the little birds and animals making her a dress, they do cosmetic surgery. Bluebirds give her a facelift. Squirrels give her implants. Snakes, liposuction. Plus, Cinderella starts out as a lonely little boy."

"[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."

"Our real discoveries come from chaos."

"It's because we're so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the"

"A sexual reassignment surgery is a miracle for some people, but if you don't want it, it's the ultimate form of self-mutilation."

"Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct."

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

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

"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."