Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk

Give me attention. Flash. Give me beauty. Flash. Give me peace and happiness, a loving relationship, and a perfect home. Flash.

Typhoid Mary or Ted Bundy or Sharon Tate. History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.

A different toothbrush waits in every time zone.

I suppose it's a comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse damage to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict.

Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.

Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is the insomnia. Try to relax a little more with every breath out, but your heart's still racing and your thoughts tornado in your head. Nothing works. Not guided meditation. You're in Ireland. Not counting sheep. You count up the days, hours, minutes since you can remember falling asleep.

My whole life is about for­get­ting. It's my most valu­able job skill.

you can make mean anything.

The same as most prayers, the bulk of what you hear is complaints and demands. Help me. Hear me. Lead me. Forgive me.

You re­al­ize that our mis­trust of the fu­ture makes it hard to give up the past.

Never, ever say the dildo accidentally turned itself on.

You get a glass tank, put it where the TV used to be, and all you get is a lizard—something so stupid that every time the maid moves a rock the lizard thinks it's been relocated miles away.

The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a stamp that said DEAD. The caseworker told me this a few years ago when the suicides started back up again. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. This is how things get recycled.

I just couldn't go there yet. Settle for less. I didn't want to process through anything. I didn't want to pick up any pieces. Lower my expectations. Get on with my less-than life. I didn't want to feel better about being still alive. Start compensating.

The hardest blessing you give up is silence.

If the prodigal son had never left home, the fatted calf would still be alive.

Looming visage noble American colonel. Courageous, renown of history, Colonel Sanders, image forever accompanied odor of sacrificial meat. Eternal flame offering wind savory perfume roasted flesh.

When you're twenty-four," Marla says, "you have no idea how far you can really fall, but I was a fast learner.

And sometimes being mutilated can work to your advantage. All those people now with piercings and tattoos and brandings and scarification... What I mean is, attention is attention.

By the time you turn thirty, your life is about escaping the person you've become in order to escape the person you've become in order to escape the person you started as.

Marla said, This isn't like when guys sit backward on the toilet and pretend it's a motorcycle. This is a genuine accident.

People will just knock each other down to dial 911 and be the big hero.

You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

The first time you meet that some­one spe­cial, you can count on them one day be­ing dead and in the ground.