# Quote — Chuck Palahniuk, Damned

> I do hereby and forever abandon abandoning all hope. Honestly, I give up on giving up. I'm just not cut out to be some hopeless, disillusioned wretch with no aspirations for the rest of the eternity, sprawled catatonic in my own feces on a cold stone floor. In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple of days of hopelessness. Future scientists would call it Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case of history chasing rainbows.

- Author: [Chuck Palahniuk](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chuck-palahniuk.md)
- Book: [Damned](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chuck-palahniuk/damned.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Chuck_Palahniuk#Damned_(2011)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/chuck-palahniuk/damned/i-do-hereby

## More from this book

> If the living are haunted by the dead. Then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chuck-palahniuk/damned/if-the-living.md)

> Yes, and I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smokey eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's the kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive 'let them eat cake' type of chauvinism.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chuck-palahniuk/damned/yes-and-i-know.md)

> "[I]f you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. A child allows us to revisit the excitement we once felt about, well...everything. A generation later, our grandkids bump up our enthusiasm yet again. Reproducing is a kind of booster shot to keep us loving life."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chuck-palahniuk/damned/i-f-you-ask.md)