Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

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“Which is worse, Hell or nothing? Only if we're caught and punished can we be saved.”

“Religions exist because people would rather have a wrong answer than no answer at all.”

“Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.”

“Rip yourself open. Sew yourself shut.”

“Besides, hysteria is only possible with an audience.”

“The cancer I don't have is everywhere now.”

“Ignorance was bliss.”

“Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born?”

“You ever wonder when god's coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?”

“Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity, you will become a statistic.”

“There are bodies buried everywhere you just have to know where to look.”

“Maybe this is why Misty loved him. Loved you. Because you believed in her so much more than she did. You expected more from her than she did from herself.”

“Just let your hand drop; and let fate decide for you.”

“You just don’t expect to meet dead people.”

“You can't be beautiful until you feel beautiful.”

“Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us," Mr Whittier says, "It's how we digest our lives. Our experiences.”

“Some stories, she'd say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be.”

“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.”

“In Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth.”

“Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too. This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine.”

“The whole idea of men creating perfect robot women for their own pleasure, it happens every day. The most "beautiful" women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotypes of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of Cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look.”

“You will always have some excuse not to live your life.”

“For the rest of history, all over the world, people will be trying to save this same dead woman. This woman who just wanted to die.”

“Our footsteps echo against the concrete floor. The steel roof hums with rain. And she says, 'Don't you feel, somehow, buried in history?”

“I think they've always gone on. I've gotten some irate letters from oldsters saying "We did this in the 1930s. You didn't invent anything." And I'm like, "Gramps, you should have put a name on it and sold it, because that’s all I did."”

“Stink for privacy, the new way to protect personal space. Intimidation by odor.”

“Either an ancient cursed Egyptian mummy has come back to life and is trying to kill the people next door, or they're watching a movie.”

“You are permanent, but this life is not," Mr. Whittier would say. "You don't expect to visit an amusement park, then stay forever.”

“Until you can ignore your circumstances, and just do as you promise," he says, "you'll always be controlled by the world.”

“Still, he deserved to die. He called me an asshole.”

“Anymore, no one's mind is their own. You can't concentrate. You can't think. There's always some noise worming in. Singers shouting. Dead people laughing. Actors crying. All these little doses of emotion. Someone's always spraying the air with their mood.”

“According to Mona, you shouldn't kill people, because that drives you away from humanity. In order to justify killing, you have to make the victim your enemy. To justify any crime, you have to make the victim your enemy.”

“Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So just relax, Helen Boyle told me, and just enjoy the ride.
She said, "Even absolute corruption has its perks.”

“The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.”

“Their teeth white, as if they never used teeth for anything except to smile.”

“In order to save the world, Jesus Christ suffered for about thirty-six hours on the cross. I am willing to suffer an eternity in hell for the same cause.”

“Some stories, Mr. Whitter would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up. p288”

“The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our head says, 'I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew.' Meaning: I may be me - but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU.”

“What you have to love about drinking is, every swallow is an irrevocable decision. You charging ahead, in control if the game. It’s the same with pills, sedatives and painkillers, every swallow us a first definite step down some road.”

“Her dress, swimsuit-tight, leotard-tight, her pantyhose run with women pedaling bicycles going nowhere at a thousand calories an hour.”

“Why have I sold out? You think I'm supposed to grow old, beating some trite old protest drum that people don't hear anymore? Please; protest is now just a backdrop for a Diesel clothing ad in a slick fashion magazine. My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way. It's time — for me, at least — to be clever and seduce people by entertaining them. I'll never be heard if I'm always ranting and griping.”

“The earth, he'd say, is just a big machine. A big processing plant. A factory. That's your big answer. The big truth. Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That's the earth. Why it goes round. We're the rocks. And what happens to us--the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse--why, that's just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.”

“Sure, everybody wants to play God, but for me it's a full-time job.”

“Doctor Sarah didn't start out by attacking and berating everybody who called her radio show," Mona says. "She used to have a little time slot and a little audience, and she seemed to really care about helping people."”

“The way you can go to Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there's a McDonald's hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life-forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water hyacinths. Starlings. Burger Kings. The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out.. He says, "We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time."”

“These people so scared of silence. These are my neighbors. These sound-oholics. These quiet-ophobics.”

“As a fundraiser, our first idea was 'Five Bucks to Punch a Mime.”

“I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong, again.”

“Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up the reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.”