Chuck Palahniuk Quotes - Page 3

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.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.I have no native tongue.
Chuck Palahniuk
You had a near life experience.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
History is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.
Chuck Palahniuk
Where would Jesus be if no one ever wrote the gospels?
Chuck Palahniuk
Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.
Chuck Palahniuk
A woman calls from Seaview to say her linen closet is missing. Last September, her house had six bedrooms, two linen closets. She's sure of it. Now she's only got one. She comes to open her beach house for the summer. She drives out from the city with the kids and the nanny and the dog, and here they are with all heir luggage, and their towels are gone. Disappeared. Poof. Bermuda triangulated.
Chuck Palahniuk
I refuse to give readers an uplifting faux experience engineered to comfort them and perpetuate the sociopolitical and economic status quo.""Who died and made you Bertolt Brecht?
Chuck Palahniuk
How miserably hypocritical, you might say, but no sooner am I offered a chance to flee Hell than I yearn to stay. Few families hold their relations as closely as do prisons. Few marriages sustain the high level of passion that exists between criminals and those who seek to bring them to justice. It’s no wonder the Zodiac Killer flirted so relentlessly with the police. Or that Jack the Ripper courted and baited detectives with his - or her - coy letters. We all wish to be pursued. We all long to be desired.
Chuck Palahniuk
Put the gun to my head and paint walls with my brains.
Chuck Palahniuk
Suicide is very contagious.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.
Chuck Palahniuk
Humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.
Chuck Palahniuk
Your past is just a story. And once you realise this, it has no power over you.
Chuck Palahniuk
The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture.
Chuck Palahniuk
You'd be surprised just how fast you can close the door on your past. Learn needlepoint. Make a stained-glass lamp.
Chuck Palahniuk
There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.
Chuck Palahniuk
When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.
Chuck Palahniuk
I am the cause of all my upsets. I am my worst enemy.
Chuck Palahniuk
He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.
Chuck Palahniuk
Aim low and you won't be disappointed.
Chuck Palahniuk
We ourselves, will resurrect the memory in order to savor it and carry it forth into the world. We will fling it at one another for laughs. Distort it. We will toss the story into the air at parties and howl over its ripeness. Degraded as it was, we will degrade it further. Make it more swollen. We shall render it impossibly awful, making of it the mythology of ourselves. A comfort. Proof of the trials we've survived.
Chuck Palahniuk
She kept hoping that something would happen to rescue her from her own small-scale, predictable dreams.
Chuck Palahniuk
I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.
Chuck Palahniuk
they all think men are obsolete. useless. as if we're just some sexual appendix.
Chuck Palahniuk
Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends.
Chuck Palahniuk
Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.
Chuck Palahniuk
Anything you can acquire is only another thing you'll lose
Chuck Palahniuk
Only after disaster can we be resurrected.
Chuck Palahniuk
It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.
Chuck Palahniuk
Here in the bathroom with me are razor blades. Here is iodine to drink. Here are sleeping pills to swallow. You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you reenlist.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language.
Chuck Palahniuk
It sounds trite, but only because words make everything true sound trite. Because words always screw up what you're trying to say.
Chuck Palahniuk
These are Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I am Tyler's mouth. I am Tyler's hands.
Chuck Palahniuk
Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I used to be such a nice person.
Chuck Palahniuk
In a world where vows are worthless.Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.
Chuck Palahniuk
You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe 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
Chuck Palahniuk
By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior. Each of those three traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped-up tests to build a child's faith and imagination. The first test is to believe in a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust in a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: To believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money. From a man to an animal to a fairy. From toys to candy to money. Thus, interestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairy-dom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickels... dimes... and quarters. In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as he or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.
Chuck Palahniuk
At this rate, we'll never get to the future.
Chuck Palahniuk
The future is just wasted on some people.
Chuck Palahniuk
The future you have, tomorrow, won't be the same future you had, yesterday.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?
Chuck Palahniuk
When they were in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like 'Saint George and the Dragon' or 'The Rape of the Sabine Women,' but the angle you use, the lighting, the composition, the technique, they're all you. You are every color and brushstroke.
Chuck Palahniuk
If you never been rabid, you ain't never lived.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.
Chuck Palahniuk
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?
Chuck Palahniuk