Chuck Palahniuk citations

Page 17

“Et puis, quand ils sont épuisés, les hommes et les femmes vont à l'église.
Et ils se marient.
Être fatigué n'est pas la même chose qu'être riche, mais la plupart du temps c'est assez proche.”

“Tu as une classe entière de jeunes hommes et femmes forts et solides, et ils veulent donner leur vie pour quelque chose. La publicité les fait tous courir après des voitures et des vêtements dont ils n'ont pas besoin. Ils travaillent dans des métiers qu'ils haïssent, par générations entières, uniquement pour pouvoir acheter ce dont ils n'ont pas
vraiment besoin. Nous n'avons pas de grande guerre dans notre génération, ni de grande dépression, mais si, pourtant,
nous avons bien une grande guerre de l'esprit. Nous avons une grande révolution contre la culture. La grande dépression, c'est nos existences.
Nous avons une grande dépression spirituelle.”

“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.”