Chuck Palahniuk Quotes - Page 3

I am the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.

When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.

Since boyhood, fury had become his father. His older brother. His only protector. Fury gave him strength and courage and spurred him to always move forward despite always getting things wrong and always failing and no mentor there to help him or teach him and everyone always laughing. Anger delivered him from catastrophe. Rage kept him from going under. It had come to be his greatest asset and only strategy.

People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

Every garden looks beautiful in May.' Meaning: Everyone is somewhat attractive when she's young.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.

In a way, being an addict is very proactive. A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death. There is such a thing as planning your getaway.

I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

Real smart begins when you quit quoting other people.

The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God’s most selfish children would steal God’s greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.Only God has the right to surprise His children with death.

To both my parents, the world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard.

It can only take a moment to waste the rest of your life.

The only way that America can protect its prosperity and political stability will be to depopulate the Third World? Should we be surprised that the AIDS virus showed up about 1975? Do you understand what the term "depopulate" means?

Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.

We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. it's just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There's just decisions and disease and death.

It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.

It's amazing what a woman will read into if you by accident, say I love you. Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this.

You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.

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.

My stomach hurts, but if it's guilt or impacted stool, I can't tell. Either way, I'm so full of shit.

Yes, I kidnapped that Lindberg baby.

Le stelle in cieloNon conoscono l'iraBla, bla, bla, fine

Because supposedly those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

All the demons of Hell formerly reigned as gods in previous cultures. No it's not fair, but one man's god is another man's devil. As each subsequent civilization became a dominant power, among its first acts was to depose and demonize whoever the previous culture had worshipped. The Jews attacked Belial, the god of the Babylonians. The Christians banished Pan and Loki anda Mars, the respective deities of the ancient Greeks and Celts and Romans. The Anglican British banned belief in the Australian aboriginal spirits known as the Mimi. Satan is depicted with cloven hooves because Pan had them, and he carries a pitchfork based on the trident carried by Neptune. As each deity was deposed, it was relegated to Hell. For gods so long accustomed to receiving tribute and loving attention, of course this status shift put them into a foul mood.

It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

Prepare to evacuate soul in ten, in nine, eight.Chloe's splashing through the ankle-deep back-up of renal fluid from her failed kidneys.Death will commence in five.Five, four.Around her, a parasitic life spray paints her heart.Four, three.Three, two.Chloe climbs hand-over-hand up the curled lining of her own throat.Death to commence in three, two.Moonlight shines in through the open mout...h.Prepare for the last breath, now.Evacuate.Now.Soul clear of body.Death commences.Now.

The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

If you can change the way people think, she said.The way they see themselves.The way they see the world.If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives.And that's the only lasting thing you can create.

You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio light bulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you’ll be dead.

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.

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

She says, "Do you have any rubbers?" I say, I thought she was barren. "Sure, I'm sterile," she says, "but I've had unprotected sex with a million guys. I could have some terrible fatal disease." I say that would only be a problem if I wanted to live a lot longer. Fertility says, " That's how I feel about my giant credit card debt." So we have sex. If you could call it that.

For official record, if become bankrupt old retail distribution centers-labeled supermega, so-enlarged foodstuff market- later reincarnate to become worship shrine. First sell food-stuff, next then same structure sell battered furnitures, next now born as gymnasium club, next broker flea markets, only at final end of life...sell religions.

You know that old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.

...,dying seems like the greatest weakness, and in a world where people say you're lazy for not shaving your legs, then being dead seems like the ultimate character flaw. Chapter I.

For instance, if Jesus Christ had died in prison, with no one watching and with no one there to mourn or torture him, would we be saved?With all due respect.According to the agent, the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get.

What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.

A book is as private and consensual as sex.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine.

I still love him so much I'll hide any amount of conjugated estrogen in his food. So much I'll do anything to destroy him.

You young people, you who think you invented fun and drugs, fuck you

The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.

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

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

Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.

You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.

Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.

A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce a risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book. . . . A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a "mass medium." No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades.

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

- The first rule of Fight Club is: you don't talk about Fight Club. - The second rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club- Third rule of Fight Club, if someone yells “stop!”, goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over- Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight- Fifth rule: one fight at a time- Sixth rule: the fights are bare knuckle. No shirt, no shoes, no weapons- Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to- The eighth : if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight

You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.

We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.

There are worse things you can do to people you love than kill them.

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.