Invisible Monsters

"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."

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

"That's what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can't know I'm its mother. It's so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that's what I love about fire."

"Go figure, but Texans seem to be a lot more comfortable around disastrous house fires than they are around anal sex."

"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."

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

"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all."

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

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

"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."