Chuck Palahniuk Quotes - Page 2

My mom would spy by satellite, turning down the air conditioning, colder and colder, with a tapping keystroke via her wireless connection, chilling that house, that one room, meat locker cold, ski-slope cold, spending a king's ransom on Freon and electric power, trying to make some doomed ten bucks' worth of pretty pink flowers last one more day.
Chuck Palahniuk
That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.
Chuck Palahniuk
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
Chuck Palahniuk
During the Cold War of the 1950s, American spies were issued eyeglasses with thick, clunky frames. If captured, they were trained to casually chew the curved earpieces, where fatal doses of cyanide were cast inside the plastic. It's these same horn-rimmed suicide glasses, the wrangler says, that inspired the look of Buddy Holly and Elvis Costello. All those young hipsters wearing death on their nose.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
No, I say, it's fine.Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains. Just great, I say. Really.
Chuck Palahniuk
First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.
Chuck Palahniuk
Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master, and nobody had noticed. Still, i'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When i pass people in the hall at work, I get toally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE.
Chuck Palahniuk
Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit.
Chuck Palahniuk
Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.
Chuck Palahniuk
By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember.
Chuck Palahniuk
Fathers. Mothers. With all their caring and attention. They will f--- you up, every time.
Chuck Palahniuk
Listening, it occurred to Randall that the love people feel for animals is the purest form of love. Loving an animal, a horse, cat, or dog, was always a romantic tragedy. It meant loving something that would die before you. Like that movie with Ali McGraw. There was no future, just the affection of the present moment. You didn't expect a big payoff, someday.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
In capitalist nation, all is decided by money.
Chuck Palahniuk
What makes the earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it ought to feel like Heaven.
Chuck Palahniuk
In all seriousness, Archer claims that if you, as a living, alive person, hear the song "You're the One That I Want" from the musical Grease three times in a single day - seemingly by accident, whether in an elevator, on a radio, a telephone hold button, or whatever - it indicates that you'll surely die before sunset.
Chuck Palahniuk
...,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.
Chuck Palahniuk
Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.
Chuck Palahniuk
HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.
Chuck Palahniuk
And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia.
Chuck Palahniuk
Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.
Chuck Palahniuk
You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
... the first step to eternal live is you have to die.
Chuck Palahniuk
We live and we die and anything else is just a delusion.
Chuck Palahniuk
According lecture, entire effort United States to incite desire, inflict want, inspire demand.
Chuck Palahniuk
You have to give up! you have to give up!You have to realize that someday you will die,Until you know that, you are useless!
Chuck Palahniuk
The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.
Chuck Palahniuk
You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.
Chuck Palahniuk
They told me that nothing was a sin, just a poor life choice. Poor impulse control. That nothing is evil. Any concept of right versus wrong, according to them, is merely a cultural construct relative to one specific time and place. They said that if anything should force us to modify our personal behavior it should be our allegiance to a social contract, not some vague, externally imposed threat of flaming punishment.
Chuck Palahniuk
[W]hat makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.
Chuck Palahniuk
As human beings, our first commandment is:Something needs to happen
Chuck Palahniuk
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.
Chuck Palahniuk
You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,' he says, 'the same way this theater seems to digest people.' With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky and growing mold, branched with arms and legs.Other events—the ones you can’t digest—they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can’t talk about, they rot you from the inside out. Until you’re Cassandra’s wet shadow on the ground. Sunk in your own yellow protein mud.But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell—you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good. Those are stories as important as food. Those are stories you can use to make people laugh or cry or sick. Or scared. To make people feel the way you felt. To help exhaust that past moment for them and for you. Until that moment is dead.Consumed. Digested. Absorbed.
Chuck Palahniuk
A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.
Chuck Palahniuk
Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.
Chuck Palahniuk
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.
Chuck Palahniuk
Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.
Chuck Palahniuk
Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
Chuck Palahniuk
Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit.
Chuck Palahniuk
The idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.
Chuck Palahniuk
You only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.
Chuck Palahniuk
Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong.
Chuck Palahniuk
The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.
Chuck Palahniuk
I'm an invisible monster. I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse.
Chuck Palahniuk
What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.
Chuck Palahniuk
It's okay if there isn't a God anymore, but I still want to respect something. I don't want to be the center of my own universe,
Chuck Palahniuk
Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.
Chuck Palahniuk
Ignorance was bliss.
Chuck Palahniuk
You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. Until it's too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble. So you just walk home.
Chuck Palahniuk
Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer . . . or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded--the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty. [ellipses original]
Chuck Palahniuk
When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk