Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

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“We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.”

“People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.”

“Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.”

“At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.”

“You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm.”

“Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.
This only looks like love.”

“To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days.”

“The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.”

“If we can forgive what's been done to us… If we can forgive what we've done to others… If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.”

“Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.”

“Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.”

“In a world where vows are worthless. Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.”

“I'm not sure what we're running from. Nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up. Getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if running we won't have to get on with our lives.”

“What if reality is nothing but some disease?”

“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.”

“Rant would tell people: 'You're a different human being to everybody you meet.”

“I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I ran some more.”

“We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”

“The joke is, we all have the same punchline.”

“Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.”

“Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.”

“You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away.”

“I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.”

“By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember.”

“It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.”

“Sex pretty much cures everything.”

“You can’t fool people into loving you.”

“Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday.”

“I’m breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions, because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.”

“No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way.”

“Tyler lies back and asks, "If Marilyn Monroe were alive right now, what would she be doing?"

I say, goodnight.

The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling and Tyler says, "Clawing at the lid of her coffin.”

“If you're going to read this, don't bother.”

“History is is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.”

“You have to give up! you have to give up!
You have to realize that someday you will die,
Until you know that, you are useless!”

“Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”

“Young people want mirrors. Older people want art.”

“Anything you can aquire is only another thing you'll lose.”

“The future is just wasted on some people.”

“You grow up to become living proof of your parents' limitations. Their less-than masterpiece.”

“The most boring thing in the entire world is nudity. The second most boring thing is honesty.”

“I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything… I wish, just once, I could say, 'This. This is good enough. Just because I choose it.”

“Oh love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I'll be anybody you want me to be.”

“For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.”

“There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.”

“Why do I do anything?' she says. 'I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream.”

“That’s pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our attention. Jacking off. Denial.”

“First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.”

“The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.”

“Real smarts begin when you quit quoting other people……..”