Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

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“Tell the world what scares you most. Save the world with some advice from the future.”

“Some people still think knowledge is power.”

“Recycling and speed limits are bullshit. They're like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.”

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

“Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.”

“If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.”

“Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.”

“My inventory of people who can save me is down to just me.”

“Also consider that someday, when you’re dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.”

“According to Plato, we don't learn anything. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything. Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know.”

“This is passive-aggression in action.”

“If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.”

“No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”

“The air will always be to filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.”

“Every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?”

“All you can do is hope for a pattern to emerge, and sometimes it never does. Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that.”

“You're not getting this back you know. Consider it an asshole tax.”

“We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics.”

“Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.”

“I am nothing, and not even that.”

“So maybe I'll spend some years in prison, but you'll have a big head start on me in hell!”

“In truth, the degree of anyone's success depends on how often they can say the word yes and hear the word no.”

“you can't escape the world, and you're not responsible for how you look, if you look beauticious or butt ugly. you're not responsible for how you feel or what you say or how you act or anything you do. it's all out of your hands.”

“some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.”

“These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”

“Help me give up my addiction to Hope.”

“We went sailing one time, and he wore a Speedo, and any smart woman should know that means bisexual at least.”

“Life is short, death is forever”

“Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.”

“The police are asking through the bedroom door, why did I make a batch of strawberry daiquiris before I called them?
Because we were out of raspberries.
Because, can't they see, it just does not matter. Time was not of the essence.”

“To repeat, the way you get to the huge, impossible yes is, you start collecting a lot of easy, small yeses.”

“I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that.”

“Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.”

“Its only after you've lost everything," Tyler says, "that you're free to do anything.”

“The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact. Every play-by-play description on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds. Even Sound and light can only go so fast.”

“Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.”

“Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.”

“You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound You don't win with a lot of treble.”

“Waiters will always pee in soup, people will always fall in love.”

“Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.”

“Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit.”

“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction. These people with dead children, you want to tell them, go ahead. Blame yourself. There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.”

“I know this because Tyler knows this.”

“It's the Marilyn Monroe school of medicine where enough of any drug will cure any disease.”

“I want to have your abortion.”

“It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.”

“Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.”

“He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.”

“Any time some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you're a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink.”