The Invention of Sound
Chuck Palahniuk
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We are each our own best effort. And we’re satisfied until we see a photograph or hear a recording of our voice. All the worse is the torture of video, to witness the squawking, gawky monster we’ve created. The you that you’ve chosen from all possible yous to create. The one life you’ve been given, and you’ve dedicated it to perfecting this staggering yammering artificial Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from the traits of other people. Anything original, anything innately you, it’s long ago been discarded.”
“The deal with dating conceited men like him was that she'd hoped some of his excess self-esteem would rub off. Women always secretly hoped this: that dating a narcissist would give them confidence by osmosis. It never worked.”
“Our greatest creation is our selves. The way we cultivate our appearance and behavior. And nowhere is our artwork more apparent than in our own minds. They way we each have an idea of self. The one perfect self we've chosen by rejecting all other options.”
“It was hard not to love a man who so steadfastly ignored the awful truth about her. But it was even more difficult to respect him.”
“The past lived on in her hands, the way they'd shaken when Mitzi took her first DAT into a pitch. The memory lived as pain in her scalp, the old tug of her hair. She'd such long hair back then. High school-long hair, she'd pulled it tight, knotting it into a French braid she'd pinned down. Her French braid pinned to the back of her head, pinned as cruelly as any butterfly or scarab beetle pinned to the board in freshman-year Biology of Insects.”
“Taco Tuesday. Only in prisons and aboard submarines were people more excited about food than they were in office jobs.”
“Stabbing, Mitzi could write a book about. For example, why some killers kept stabbing for so long. Only the first thrust is intended to inflict pain. The subsequent twenty, thirty, forty stab wounds are to resolve the suffering.”
“Since the dawn of films when young women had been tied to railroad tracks and tied to logs sent into hug sawmill blades, Hollywood ha never lacked new ways to take pretty girls apart.”
“My job,” Mitzi said, “is to make everyone in the whole world scream at the exact same time.”
“Lucy never bought the reason for trimming the pot roast,” he recounted. Her mother had offered other reasonable explanations. The smaller end tended to be too fatty, for example. The bit they trimmed away always served up too bitter or too tough. Whatever the case, her mother had reasoned, this was how she’d been taught by her mother, Lucinda’s grandmother, so this was how she meant to teach her own daughter. “And still”—Foster shrugged and offered up both hands helplessly—“Lucinda insisted they call her grandmother and keep asking.” So they’d called Lucinda’s grandmother. A woman dead of cancer for three years now. And they’d asked why it was so important to trim the smaller end off the pot roast. Here he wound up to deliver the story’s payoff. “It wasn’t because the meat cooked unevenly or dried out,” he said. “It was because the only roasting pan they’d had—so long ago—had only been so-big.” A lesson in perpetuating a mistake across generations. A dozen valid reasons, all wrong.”
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Book Keywords:
mutilation, food, modern-society, slasher-movies, foley-artist, self-creation, narcissists, love, office-jobs, relationships, respect, self-esteem, existential, memory-storage, stabbing
