Diary (novel)

Diary is a 2003 novel by American author Chuck Palahniuk.


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


 * "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."


 * "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."


 * "The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect."


 * "If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion."


 * "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." 


 * "It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."


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


 * "There is nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics."


 * "What you don't understand you can make mean anything."


 * "Today is the longest day of the year-but anymore, everyday is. The weather today is increasing concern followed by fullblown dread. The man calling from Long Beach, he says his bathroom is missing."


 * "Dear sweet Peter. Can you feel this?"


 * “... you people with your ex-wives and stepchildren, your blended families and failed marriages, you’ve ruined your world and now you want to ruin mine...”


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


 * "Leave this island before you can't."


 * "Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary."


 * "Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit."


 * "All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired."


 * "What she learned is what she always learns. Plato was right. We are all of us immortal. We couldn't die if we wanted to."


 * "If you're here, then you've failed again."


 * "We were here. We are here. We will always be here. And we've failed again."


 * The official name for your liver spots is hyperpigmented lentigines. The official anatomy word for a wrinkle is rhytide. Those creases in the top half of your face, the rhytides plowed across your forehead and around your eyes, this is dynamic wrinkling, also called hyperfunctional facial lines, caused by the movement of underlying muscles. Most wrinkles in the lower half of the face are tatic rhytides, caused by sun and gravity.


 * Your skin comes in three basic layers. What you can touch is the stratum corneum, a layer of flat, dead skin cells pushed up by the new cells under them. What you feel, that greasy feeling, is your acid mantle, the coating of oil and sweat that protects you from germs and fungus. Under that is your dermis. Below the dermis is a layer of fat. Below the fat are the muscles of your face


 * When you pull up your upper lipwhen you show that one top tooth, the one the museum guard brokethis 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.


 * 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.


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


 * "Because you believed in her so much more than she did. You expected more from her than she did from herself."


 * "Everyone's in their own personal coma."


 * "You have endless ways you can commit suicide without 'dying' dying."

This is what you think you know best."
 * "Let’s look in the mirror. Really look at your face. Look at your eyes, your mouth.

These are the tree layers of your skin. These are the three women in your life. The epidermis, the dermis, and the fat. Your wife, your daughter, and your mother.
 * If you're a little confused right now, relax. Don't worry. All you need to know is this is your face. This is what you think you know best.


 * "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."


 * "Now, smile—if you still can."


 * The weather today is increasing concern followed by full-blown dread.


 * 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.