09/03/08 – 9:08am (quotes from the book ‘Rant’)
2008 September 3
Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey is a novel by Chuck Palahniuk released on May 1, 2007.
Rant is told in the form of an oral biography. When the story begins, the reader discovers that the main character, Buster Landru “Rant” Casey, is already deceased. Throughout the book various people discuss their memories of Buster and the world he lived in, presenting stories in an occasionally conflicting timeline. It also became a national bestseller in May of 2008 and has remained on the list for 6 weeks. Real-life author Victor Turner is briefly quoted as one of the contributors.
- “The big reason why folks leave a small town,” Rant use to say, “is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.”
Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere. pg 12
- “Life’s greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.” pg 13
- “Nothing says you have to swallow this,” Rant told me. “You can always just die.”
- “The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same future you had, yesterday.”
- “What ‘Typhoid Mary’ Mallon was to typhoid, what Gaetan Dugas was to AIDS, and Liu Jian Lun was to SARS, Buster Casey would become for rabies.”
- “This is what church should feel like.”
- “You grow up to become living proof of your parent’s limitations. Their less-than-masterpiece.”
- “What bothered Rant was the fake, bullshit nature of everything.”
- “Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies.”
- “You burn out your brain with rabies. Go all theta-trance-y with driving. You hit something and wake up naked in history.”
- “What if reality is nothing but some disease?” Page 215
- “There’s worse ways to be dead than dying.”
- “Couldn’t you guess that old time gods and saviors like Jesus and Isis and Shiva are just losers with beater Torinos and Mustangs who went party crashing and found a way to ‘sever their origins’? Maybe they all started as real nobodies, and as their reality faded, a new story piled up around them?”
- “Do you ever wish you’d never been born?”
- “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.”
- “A sexually conflicted thirteen-year-old rattlesnake venom junkie with rabies. It’s safe to say that’s every father’s worst nightmare.”
- “If just one leader in the world emerged – Rant Casey or anybody- the arms of us, ready to fight and die, wouldn’t we be invincible?”
- “I’ve survived, that, the day I finally meet Death, the two of us will be old, long lost friends. Me and Death, separated at birth.” P.198
