Quotes from Neil Strauss

Well, he said, opening the door to his car, all you can do is put on an appearance of confidence sometimes. And after a while, others will start to believe it. [Eric Weber] grabbed the door handle to pull it closed. And then you die.

They say that when you meet someone and feel like it's love at first sight, run in the other direction. All that's happened is that your dysfunction has meshed with their dysfunction. Your wounded inner child has recognized their wounded inner child, both hoping to be healed by the same fire that burned them.

There is a downside to casual sex: Sometimes it stops being casual. People develop a desire for something more. And when one person's expectations don't match the other person's, then whoever holds the highest expectations suffers. There is no such thing as cheap sex. It always comes with a price.

All the things you've been trying to get from these relationships—freedom, understanding, fairness, acceptance—are exactly the things that you never got from your mom. So every time you load all that unfinished business onto your partner, you're setting yourself up for another disappointment. Because as an adult, the only person who can give you those things is you.

I was no longer in the game to meet women; I was in the game to lead men.

Evidently, women have eating disorders, men have sex addiction. I suppose both share the same obsession: women's bodies.

I was becoming too dependent on female attention, allowing it to be my sole reason for leaving the house besides food. In the process of dehumanizing the opposite sex, I had also been dehumanizing myself.

Our Society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It's an inevitability tourists can't help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins?

The underlying cause of most unfulfilled lives is that we are simply too close to ourselves to see clearly enough to get out of our own way.

I used to think that intelligence came from books and knowledge and rational thought. But that's not intelligence: It's just information and interpretation. Real intelligence is when your mind and your heart connect. That's when you see the truth so clearly and unmistakably that you don't have to think about it. In fact, all thinking will do is lead you away from the truth and soon you'll be back in your head, groping with a penlight in the dark again.

I wish she were receptive enough to discuss what I learned, but you can't expect the same person who wounded you to heal you. So

True endurance, I think, comes from the inside. It comes from motivation and belief in what you're doing.

Mystery] delivered one of the many great aphorisms that that he used to turn defeat into triumph. Where there's a problem, there's an opportunity.

Pickup is a linear process: Capture the imagination first and the heart next. Interest plus attraction plus seduction equals sex.

Logically, I know I'm being controlled by my emotions. But my logic is just 2 percent right now. I feel emotionally raw. [Mystery] clenched his bedsheet in his fist. I feel strange and empty, like after a shit.

He asked her what she was famous for—everybody's famous for something

On Seeing the 100 Percent Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning" by Haruki Murakami.

As anyone who regularly reads newspapers or true-crime books knows, a significant percentage of violent crime, from kidnappings to shooting sprees, is the result of the frustrated sexual impulses and desires of males. By socializing guys like Sasha, Mystery and I were making the world a safer place.

The problem many people have is that the exact quality that originally attracted them to their partner becomes a threat once a serious relationship begins.

Besides confidence and a smile, we learned, the other characteristics of an alpha male were being well-groomed, possessing a sense of humor, connecting with people, and being seen as the social center of a room.

After an hour of blather, I started to understand Tyler Durden. Human interaction to him was a program. Behavior was determined by frames and congruence and state and validation and other big-chunk psychological principles. And he wanted to be the Wizard of Oz: the little guy behind the curtain, pulling the strings that made everyone around him think he was a big and powerful master of the realm. I

Men are not dogs. We merely think we are and, on occasion, act as if we are. But, by believing in our nobler nature, women have the amazing power to inspire us to live up to it. This is one reason why men tend to fear commitment—and sometimes, as in Mystery's case, even rebel against it by endeavoring to bring out the worst in a woman.

Whenever people idealize their caretakers, chances are pretty good that the opposite is true. Sometimes illusion is created by the parents, who insists in godlike fashion that they're perfect and that the child owes them obedience because they're responsible for his or her existence. Other times the illusion is created by the child as a survival strategy, disconnecting from reality in order to avoid the pain of growing up in a toxic enviroment.

Love is a cage only when you feel indebted to it, constrained by it, responsible to its owner.