Chuck Palahniuk Quotes - Page 4

Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you’d been reading.
Chuck Palahniuk
They placed their bets with such self righteous bravado, but I’m the one who lost.
Chuck Palahniuk
Help me give up my addiction to Hope.
Chuck Palahniuk
Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.
Chuck Palahniuk
No, it’s not fair, but what makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. It won’t help the situation for you to get all upset.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people.
Chuck Palahniuk
Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.
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
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
It's the last frontier to conquer, other people, strangers, the jungle of their arms and legs, hair and skin, the smells and moans that is everybody you haven't done. The great unknowns. The last forest to devastate. Here's everything you've only imagined.
Chuck Palahniuk
A woman eats to feed her pussy." Meaning: Anything we do to excess is in compensation for not getting a minimum amount of sexual gratification.
Chuck Palahniuk
The tiny space, the toilet, two hundred strangers just a few inches away, it's so exciting, the lack of room to maneuver, it helps if you're double-jointed. Use your imagination. Some creativity and a few simple stretching exercises and you can be knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. You'll be amazed how time flies.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut hosing orgasm.
Chuck Palahniuk
My mom says, "Do you know what the AIDS memorial quilt is all about?"Jump to how much I hate my brother at this moment.I bought this fabric because I thought it would make a nice panel for Shane," Mom says. "We just ran into some problems with what to sew on it."Give me amnesia.Flash.Give me new parents.Flash.Your mother didn't want to step on any toes," Dad says. He twists a drumstick off and starts scraping the meat onto a plate. "With gay stuff you have to be so careful since everything means something in secret code. I mean, we didn't want to give people the wrong idea."My Mom leans over to scoop yams onto my plate, and says, "Your father wanted a black border, but black on a field of blue would mean Shane was excited by leather sex, you know, bondage and discipline, sado and masochism." She says, "Really, those panels are to help the people left behind."Strangers are going to see us and see Shane's name," my dad says. "We didn't want them thinking things."The dishes all start their slow clockwise march around the table. The stuffing. The olives. The cranberry sauce. "I wanted pink triangles but all the panels have pink triangles," my mom says. "It's the Nazi symbol for homosexuals." She says,"Your father suggested black triangles, but that would mean Shane was a lesbian. It looks like female pubic hair. The black triangle does."My father says, "Then I wanted a green border, but it turns out that would mean Shane was a male prostitute."My mom says, "We almost chose a red border, but that would mean fisting. Brown would mean either scat or rimming, we couldn't figure which."Yellow," my father says, "means watersports."A lighter shade of blue," Mom says, "would mean just regular oral sex."Regular white," my father says, "would mean anal. White could also mean Shane was excited by men wearing underwear." He says, "I can't remember which."My mother passes me the quilted chicken with the rolls still warm inside.We're supposed to sit and eat with Shane dead all over the table in front of us.Finally we just gave up," my mom says, "and I made a nice tablecloth out of the material."Between the yams and the stuffing, Dad looks down at his plate and says, "Do you know about rimming?"I know it isn't table talk.And fisting?" my mom asks.I say, I know. I don't mention Manus and his vocational porno magazines.We sit there, all of us around a blue shroud with the turkey more like a big dead baked animal than ever, the stuffing chock full of organs you can still recognize, the heart and gizzard and liver, the gravy thick with cooked fat and blood. The flower centerpiece could be a casket spray.Would you pass the butter, please?" my mother says. To my father she says, "Do you know what felching is?
Chuck Palahniuk
Sex pretty much cures everything.
Chuck Palahniuk
My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.
Chuck Palahniuk
For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose ... watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
Good news didn't seem real until you'd told at least a dozen friends.
Chuck Palahniuk
Even if you tell yourself "Today I'm going to drink coffee the wrong way ... from a dirty boot." Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot.Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right. Even when you say, "I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong..." you're right. You're right about being wrong. You're right even when you're an idiot. No matter how stupid your idea, you're doomed to be right because it's yours.
Chuck Palahniuk
We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them.
Chuck Palahniuk
I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.
Chuck Palahniuk
What if reality is nothing but some disease?
Chuck Palahniuk
We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
Chuck Palahniuk
Real smart begins when you quit quoting other people.
Chuck Palahniuk
We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
You gain power by pretending to be weak.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother.
Chuck Palahniuk
Angel says that rich people don't like to tolerate much. 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
No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline.
Chuck Palahniuk
Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.
Chuck Palahniuk
We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.
Chuck Palahniuk
There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.There is no free will. There are no variables.
Chuck Palahniuk
We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.
Chuck Palahniuk
There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.There is no free will. There are no variables.
Chuck Palahniuk
they should let some people into the library by prescription only
Chuck Palahniuk
Art never comes from happiness
Chuck Palahniuk
It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.
Chuck Palahniuk
As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.
Chuck Palahniuk
Art never comes from happiness.
Chuck Palahniuk
It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.
Chuck Palahniuk
Prepare to evacuate soul in five, in four, three, two, one.
Chuck Palahniuk
These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.
Chuck Palahniuk
If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.
Chuck Palahniuk
Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
There are lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.
Chuck Palahniuk
No, whether a woman is a concubine to fuck or a damsel to redeem, she's always just some passive object to fulfill a man's purpose.
Chuck Palahniuk
The club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the centre of attention but completely cut off from participating with anyone else. You're the corpse in an English murder mystery.
Chuck Palahniuk
Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.
Chuck Palahniuk
We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them.
Chuck Palahniuk
This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.
Chuck Palahniuk
The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.
Chuck Palahniuk