Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

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“We're all of us haunted and haunting.”

“Your past is just a story. And once you realize this it has no power over you.”

“Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight. Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.”

“If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?'

Clawing at the roof of her coffin.”

“We all have this moment, when your folks first see you as someone not growing up to be them.”

“The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.”

“Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.”

“Mylife might be little and boring, but at least it’s mine - not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.”

“She's not wearing makeup so her face just looks like skin.”

“HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.”

“Which is worse: Hell or nothing?”

“Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.”

“Being tired isn't the same as being rich, but most times it's close enough.”

“I used rebellion as a way to hide out. We use criticism as a fake participation.”

“A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.”

“The weather today is partly angry, leading to resignation and ultimatums.”

“Without animals, there would be no humanity. In a world of just people, people will mean nothing…”

“After a good-looking boy gives you rabies two, three times, you'll settle down and marry somebody less exciting for the rest of your life”

“For this moment, nothing matters. Look up into the stars and you're gone.”

“This isn't about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.”

“The first rule of fight club is, you don't talk about fight club.”

“Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.”

“What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.”

“No, it’s not fair, but what makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. It won’t help the situation for you to get all upset.”

“That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you’d never want to own or do another thing. That if you could eat or sleep enough, you’d never need more. That if enough people loved you, you’d stop needing love.”

“My point is, that if I'm honest, my life is all about me.”

“Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone.”

“With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.”

“We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra…”

“There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.”

“We live and we die and anything else is just a delusion.”

“What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?”

“Doesn't reincarnation strike you as just another form of procrastination?”

“Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.”

“You cannot be the person they know and the great, glorious person you want to become. Not at the same time.”

“All human beings search for either reasons to be good, or excuses to be bad.”

“His computer password is "password.”

“Hey, you created me! I didn't create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!”

“Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.”

“I just don't want to die without a few scars.”

“Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.”

“Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.”

“I suppose it’s comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse things to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict.”

“My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.”

“Art never comes from happiness.”

“You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it.”

“This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.”

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.”

“We're the culture that cried wolf.”