Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk

These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.

Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy.

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War, No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point.

Someday, I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff.

On a night without moon or stars you can't see a thing, but you can imagine anything.

Every high school has its Romeo and Juliet, one tragic couple. So does every generation.

I fainted....and you ate my ass? You fed me my own ass?

The liberator who destroys my property is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free.

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.

We'd turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we'd survive to talk about.

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.

No, it's not fair, but what makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.

It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

This is fish number six hundred and forty-one in a lifetime of goldfish. My parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of God. Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.

Let me be the ring leader in your guilt gang-bang.

Find what you're afraid of most and go live there.

Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a Barbie doll, a vacuum cleaner. We're all such products.

Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.

If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture.

It's nice to see something more pathetic than I feel right now.

I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut hosing orgasm.