Chuck Palahniuk

Grace says, "We all die." She says, "The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."

"After you know about biology, you don't have to be used by it."

"You can’t put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping. That quest for something pretty. A cheat. A cliché."

"And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people. [...] It got until she didn’t belong anywhere. It got so nobody was good enough, refined enough, real enough. [...] Nothing was as real as her imagined world."

"Stendhal syndrome, Angel says, is a medical term. It's when a painting, or any form of art, is so beautiful it overwhelms the viewer. It's a form of shock. When Stendhal toured the Church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1817, he reported almost fainting from joy. People feel rapid heart palpitations. They get dizzy. Looking at great art makes you forget your own name, forget even where you're at. It can bring on depression and physical exhaustion. Amnesia. Panic. Heart attack. Collapse."

"Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal.”

An artists job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble.

"Let’s look in the mirror. Really look at your face. Look at your eyes, your mouth.

"Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way."

When you pull up your upper lip----when you show that one top tooth, the one the museum guard broke----this is your levator labii superioris muscle at work. Your sneer muscle. Let's pretend you smell some old stale urine. Imagine your husband's just killed himself in your family car. Imagine you have to go out and sponge his piss out of the driver's seat.

"If you're not drunk and half naked by this point, you're not paying attention."

When a normal person, some normal innocent person who sure as hell deserved a lot better, when she comes home from waiting tables all day and finds her husband suffocated in the family car, his bladder leaking, and she screams, this is simply her orbicularis stretched to the very limit.