Chuck Palahniuk Quotes - Page 2

In capitalist nation, all is decided by money.

I am the cause of all my upsets. I am my worst enemy.

They'd told him he had talent. That word was heroin to the young. Talent

Put the gun to my head and paint walls with my brains.

I was very invested in love but it was just this long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it's about getting off.

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.

For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes.

Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

Could you hold the chainsaw a bit closer to your mouth, please?

Maybe the truth is I really want to like you instead.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?

It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

Maybe God left it up to people to develop the ability to bring back Christ into their lives. Maybe God wanted us to invent our own savior when we were ready. When we need it most. Denny says maybe it's up to us to create our own messiah. To save ourselves.

It sounds trite, but only because words make everything true sound trite. Because words always screw up what you're trying to say.

Help me give up my addiction to Hope.

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.

Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home… it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.

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.

After fight club you're so relaxed, you just cannot care.

She kept hoping that something would happen to rescue her from her own small-scale, predictable dreams.

It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.What it's going to be, I don't know.Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.And maybe knowing isn't the point.Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected.

She said when a boy and a girl dog copulate, the head of the boy's penis swells and the vaginal muscles of the girl constrict. Even after sex, both dogs remain locked together, helpless and miserable for a brief period of time.The Mommy said this same scenario described most marriages.

Anything you can acquire is only another thing you'll lose

We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them.

Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they'd leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a source of meat. These islands, they were pristine. These were home to breeds of birds with no natural predators. Breeds of birds that lived nowhere else on earth. The plants there, without enemies they evolved without thorns or poisons. Without predators and enemies, these islands, they were paradise. The sailors, the next time they visited these islands, the only things still there would be herds of goats or pigs. Oyster is telling this story. The sailors called this "seeding meat." Oyster says, "Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the ol' Adam and Eve story?" Looking out the car window, he says, "You ever wonder when God's coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?

Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit.

No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.

Skinny guys fight till they're burger.

Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I'm wondering how clean this gun is.

And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.

Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.

The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, you life becomes less about living and more about waiting. For cancer. For dementia. Every look in a mirror, you scan for the red rash that means shingles. See also: Ringworm. See also: Lyme disease, meningitis, rheumatic fever, syphilis.

If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we don't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.

Some people still think knowledge is power.

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

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

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

they should let some people into the library by prescription only

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

Ok. You fuck me, then snub me. You love me, you hate me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is this a pretty accurate description of our relationship.

A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

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

If you never have sex you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from adults. It's by having sex that adolescents first rebel.And if you never have sex, you never grow beyond everything else your parents taught you. If you never break the rule against sex, you won't break any other rule.

To Mr. Jones, she said, imagine you're looking up at a blue sky, and imagine a tiny airplane skywriting the letter Z. Then let the wind erase the letter. Then imagine the plane writing the letter Y. Let the wind erase it. Then the letter X. Erase it. Then the letter W. Let the wind erase it.

Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground.

No, I say, it's fine.Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains. Just great, I say. Really.

And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people.

The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate.

Art never comes from happiness.

The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a stamp that said DEAD. The caseworker told me this a few years ago when the suicides started back up again. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. This is how things get recycled.

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.