Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

No, we love war.War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment.“It's the mark of a very, very young soul,” Mr. Whittier used to say, “to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.”We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers.
Chuck Palahniuk
If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.
Chuck Palahniuk
I am nothing, and not even that.
Chuck Palahniuk
Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.
Chuck Palahniuk
I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things.Only end them.
Chuck Palahniuk
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?
Chuck Palahniuk
Everyone wants to feel special - attain a special status among their pears- but not too special. Most kids want to be special the same way their friends are
Chuck Palahniuk
On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Chuck Palahniuk
We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.
Chuck Palahniuk
You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.
Chuck Palahniuk
Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club.
Chuck Palahniuk
- 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
Chuck Palahniuk
But if you tell folks you're a college student, folks are so impressed. You can be a student in anything and not have to know anything. Just say toxicology or marine biokinesis, and the person you're talking to will change the subject to himself. If this doesn't work, mention the neural synapses of embryonic pigeons.
Chuck Palahniuk
To both my parents, the world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard.
Chuck Palahniuk
That’s pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our attention. Jacking off. Denial.
Chuck Palahniuk
If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
Chuck Palahniuk
She says, "I'll swear by the rose tattooed on my ass, that old man raped me."Here, the funeral parade stops. At this point, Comrade Snarky is a victim among victims. The rest of us — just her supporting cast.Mrs. Clark, leading us, she looks back and says, "He what?"And from behind his camera, Agent Tattletale says, "Me, too. He raped me first."Saint Gut-Free says, "Well what the hell...He poked me, too."As if poor skinny Saint Gut-Free had enough ass left to poke.And Mrs. Clark says, "This is not funny. Not in the least.""Tough," the Matchmaker tells her. "It's wasn't funny, either, when you raped me."Shaking his ponytail, the Duke of Vandals tells the Matchmaker, "You couldn't pay to get raped.
Chuck Palahniuk
Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.
Chuck Palahniuk
Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here.
Chuck Palahniuk
He was the kind of boy any young girl should date while she's still able to recover.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can't stop.
Chuck Palahniuk
After fight club you're so relaxed, you just cannot care.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher.
Chuck Palahniuk
Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.
Chuck Palahniuk
Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?
Chuck Palahniuk
And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people.
Chuck Palahniuk
I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.
Chuck Palahniuk
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
Give me lust, baby.Flash.Give me malice.Flash.Give me detached existentialist ennui.Flash.Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.Flash.
Chuck Palahniuk
Everybody looks a little crazy if you're looking close enough and if you can't look that close, then you don't really love them.
Chuck Palahniuk
His saliva tasted like the wet dicks of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.
Chuck Palahniuk
Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle,” Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside. This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don’t. And every year it burns, there’s more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve. Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year. The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What’s left of them...“When you think about it from a native plant perspective,” Oyster says, “Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist.” Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox.
Chuck Palahniuk
They'd told him he had talent. That word was heroin to the young. Talent
Chuck Palahniuk
Scratching Yogi's ears Michelle says 'That's just part of his job, the comforting. That's what I mean by the bhatisvata. That he's more concerned with comforting and helping, even more than his own well-being." This is a trait that more "people" should encompass.
Chuck Palahniuk
You young people, you who think you invented fun and drugs, fuck you
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
My secret wish is right now to be romancing this dead girl. A dead girl. Any dead girl. I'm not what you'd call choosy.
Chuck Palahniuk
Every garden looks beautiful in May.' Meaning: Everyone is somewhat attractive when she's young.
Chuck Palahniuk
People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.
Chuck Palahniuk
My stomach hurts, but if it's guilt or impacted stool, I can't tell. Either way, I'm so full of shit.
Chuck Palahniuk
Death is a long process," Archer says. "Your body is just the first part of you that croaks." Meaning: Beyond that, your dreams have to die. Then your expectations. And your anger about investing a lifetime in learning shit and loving people and earning money, only to have all that crap come to basically nothing. Really, your physical body dying is the easy part. Beyond that, your memories must die. And your ego. Your pride and shame and ambition and hope, all that Personal Identity Crap can take centuries to expire.
Chuck Palahniuk
your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.
Chuck Palahniuk
I asked if Tyler was an artist. Tyler shrugged...What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. . . he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler sat in the palm of a perfection he'd created himself. One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
Chuck Palahniuk
One minute was enough, Tyler said, "A person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
Chuck Palahniuk
Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I'm wondering how clean this gun is.
Chuck Palahniuk
And the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.
Chuck Palahniuk
If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't.
Chuck Palahniuk
Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
If this is death, if we are dead or dying or even if we are living and just going to die, then what do we have to fear? What are we worried about? I think the knowledge of death is freeing. That pressure we feel, the weight of life and its impending conclusion, is imaginary. And the fact that we’re all in this together is unifying: there’s solidarity in mortality.
Chuck Palahniuk
Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.
Chuck Palahniuk