to attain that road-trip trance where you come up with ideas

finally finished rant. it was really interesting. a lot of gore, a lot of matrix-y shit, and a lot of time travel involved. overall, typical fucked up palahniuk, but i enjoyed it. definitely top 5 out of his books i have read. this is how my list stands are of now -

1- invisible monsters
2- lullaby
3- choke
4- rant
5- fight club
6- survivor
7- diary
8- haunted

"Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, people won't be famous for fifteen minutes. No, in the future, everyone will sit next to someone famous for at last fifteen minutes. Typhoid Mary or Ted Bundy or Sharon Tate. History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses."

"Sell cars long enough and you'll see. Nobody's all that original. any lone weirdo comes from a big nest of weirdos. What's weird is, you go to some pigsty village in Slovakia, and suddenly even Andy Warhol makes perfect sense."

"A star blinks bright on the edge of the world, getting bright, blinding bright, growing so fast it goes past before you can hear the sound, the wind and dust of it - only a car, already come and gone. The headlights fading over the far side of the world."

"No bullshit, but I've watched people stop in the middle of a funeral, the dead body smiling there in the casket, the old ladies sobbing, and people stop to change the music. Mozart instead of Schumann. Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact.
Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising along in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you - do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, close-out, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?"

"No bullshit, but I never leave the house without a mix for anything: Falling in love. Witnessing a death. Disappointment. Impatience. Traffic. I carry a mix for any human condition. Anything really good or bad happens to me, and my way to not overreact - like, to distance my emotions - is to locate the exact perfect sound track for that moment. Even the night rant died, my automatic first thought was : Philip Glass's Violion Concerto II, or Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Minor . . .?"

"Rant goes, 'Really truly with her whole entire heart, does Echo hate somebody?'
I go, doesn't Rant mean 'love'?
And Rant shrugs and says, 'Ain't it the same thing?'"

"How does one compensate for the loss of a peer?
Looking back, I sometimes wonder if we didn't invent Rant Casey. The group of us. If, perhaps, we didn't need some wild, mythic character to represent our own vanishing lives. A marvelous, glittering antihero to be the challenge whom the rest of us - Mr. Dunyun, Miss Lawrence, and I - had survive to tell about. The moment Rant exploded on television, the moment his car burst into flame, he came this fantastic tale we could recount about our reckless Party Crashing past. And, bathed in the flare of his gasoline limelight, we would appear mythic by association."

"Not to be overly moralistic, but sometimes the death of one person can justify the death of an entire culture."

"Rant Casey used to say, 'No matter what happens, it's always now. . .' Talk about cryptic.
I think what Rant meant was, we live in the present moment of reality, and no matter what's come before, no matter how much we loved a person or a dog, when it attacks us we'll react to that moment of danger."

"All I'm saying is: What if time is nt the fragile butterfly wing that science experts keep saying?
What if time is more like a chain-link fence you can't hardly fuck up?
I mean, even if you fucked it up, even ten hundred times - how would you ever know? Any present moment, any ' right now,' we get what we get. You know?

"Didn't Rant use to say, 'The future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday'?
You got all that?"

"In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display."

"Within Eastern or Asian spirituality exists the concept that only an individual's ego ties him to the temporal world, wherein we experience physical reality and time. Within this concept, enlightened beings recognize this self-imposed limitation and attachment to the immediate world, and can choose to free their consciousness and travel to any place or period of history. With apologies to Mr. H. G. Wells, one requires no time machine. Anyone can relocate throughout history or space simply by relaxing his grip on his current reality through meditation and spiritual growth."

"Doctors are the new judge and jury. Disease is the new weapon of mass destruction."

"It helps, Chet Casey told me, to start simple. Picture time less like a river than a book. Or a record. Something finished. Like a movie, with a beginning, middle, and end, but already done and complete.
Then picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or too late, but never exactly where you'd been reading."

"Nothing says you have to believe this. Nothing says you have to even listen, but consider that plenty of smart, rich, powerful folks in history went to their graves swearing that the sun went around us. Also consider that someday, when you're dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were."

"Of greatest interest is the idea that an average person easily reaches this mystical meditation state, 'theta' brain waves, the state most sought by monks and pilgrims, simply by driving an automobile. Any long drive, anytime you've passed time and covered distance with no memory of the process, you've been submerged in deep theta-level meditation. Open to visions. Open to your subconscious. Creativity. Intuition, and spiritual enlightenment."

"Of special interest is the theta level of brain activity. It's at this frequency that mystics report that visions and inspiration are most likely to occur. In those relaxed moments, while bathing or driving or falling asleep, as you lapse into theta brain waves, you typically retrieve deep, distant memories. You make connections and achieve revelations."

"Maybe people don't travel back in time. Maybe it's lies like that, anything that smells better than the idea of death - black, inky, forever death - it's those kind of sexy lies that set up world religions. Maybe Rant is just dead."

"The Rant I tell you about is filtered and colored and distorted through me. . . And all these ways I change the past - i don't even know I'm doing most of them. You could say I constantly fuck up the past, the present, and the future."

"Ask yourself: What did I eat for breakfast today? What did I eat for dinner last night?