Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk

Optimism is the first symptom that any disease is fatal.

Lovely, forgettable faces, born to flirt and fuck and die.

Imagine a plague you catch through your ears.

You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. Until it's too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble. So you just walk home.

Really, just looking around, you feel a twinge of pity for the poor souls who succeeded in getting past the Pearly Gates. One can't help but picture the lackluster VIP lounge in Heaven, a kind of nonalcoholic ice-cream social starring Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mahatma Gandhi. Hardly anyone's idea of a with-it social register.

No mat­ter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.

I irritate; therefore I am.

Regret, Daisy knew, was the only confirmation of a well-lived life. If you didn't occasionally go too far, you weren't going anywhere.

All I want is somebody to ask me what happened. Then, I'll get on with my life.

Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?

The most boring thing in the entire world, Brandy says, is nudity. The second most boring thing, she says, is honesty. ...The third most boring thing in the entire world is your sorry-assed past. So Brandy never asked me anything.

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and adressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. [...] The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

If you ask me, reincarnation is just another way to procrastinate.

Look at your fingers, how the first joint is longer than the second is longer than the end joint. The ratio is Phi, after the sculptor Phidias. The architecture of you.

Her haunting me. The way a song stays in your head. The way you think life should be. How anything holds your attention. How your past goes with you into every day of your future.

So if reality is all a spell, and you don't really want what you think you want... If you have no free will. You don't really know what you know. You don't really love who you only think you love. What do you have left to live for?

A baby is such a blank slate, like training the understudy for a role you're planning to leave. You truly hope your replacement will do the play justice, but in secret you want future critics to say you played the character better.

This is some­thing I'll go to Hell for.

Scratch any fortune and you'll find blood only a generation or two back...child labor in mines or mills...Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.

New carpet will exude poisonous formaldehyde for up to two years after it'd been laid. I know the feeling.

Our humanity isn't measured by how we treat other people, our humanity is measured by how we treat animals.

The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.

Brandy says, Don't you see? Because we're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes. Brandy says, I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life.

Her mom and dad are both doctors and want her to follow her dream, not turn out the way they have, no matter how much it costs them.