Chuck Palahniuk Quotes - Page 5

There are worse things you can do to people you love than kill them.
Chuck Palahniuk
It's not love or anything, but I think I like you, too.
Chuck Palahniuk
Therefore, when we neglect to fear such a brittle monstrosity, we render it powerless.
Chuck Palahniuk
Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.
Chuck Palahniuk
Advertising has these people chassing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need. 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 culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.
Chuck Palahniuk
This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.
Chuck Palahniuk
A book is as private and consensual as sex.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
Yes, I kidnapped that Lindberg baby.
Chuck Palahniuk
Yes, I kidnapped that Lindberg baby.
Chuck Palahniuk
After long enough, everyone in the world will be you enemy.
Chuck Palahniuk
By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.
Chuck Palahniuk
The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.
Chuck Palahniuk
Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life.
Chuck Palahniuk
Why do I do anything?' she says. 'I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream.
Chuck Palahniuk
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
Chuck Palahniuk
Some people still think knowledge is power.
Chuck Palahniuk
Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they'd leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a source of meat. These islands, they were pristine. These were home to breeds of birds with no natural predators. Breeds of birds that lived nowhere else on earth. The plants there, without enemies they evolved without thorns or poisons. Without predators and enemies, these islands, they were paradise. The sailors, the next time they visited these islands, the only things still there would be herds of goats or pigs. Oyster is telling this story. The sailors called this "seeding meat." Oyster says, "Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the ol' Adam and Eve story?" Looking out the car window, he says, "You ever wonder when God's coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you’d be ruined. Overdosed on information.
Chuck Palahniuk
That’s the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community
Chuck Palahniuk
All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.
Chuck Palahniuk
Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper.My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.
Chuck Palahniuk
The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.
Chuck Palahniuk
What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.
Chuck Palahniuk
Le stelle in cieloNon conoscono l'iraBla, bla, bla, fine
Chuck Palahniuk
What's up with you? How come you're being like this?' Because it's the truth. This is the world we live in.
Chuck Palahniuk
Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born.
Chuck Palahniuk
If she was going to die, Marla didn't want to know about it.
Chuck Palahniuk
The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life.Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.
Chuck Palahniuk
Only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes.
Chuck Palahniuk
Believe in me and you shall die, forever.
Chuck Palahniuk
The amazing miracle of death, when one second you're walking and talking, and the next second you're an object.
Chuck Palahniuk
Someday you will die, and until you know that, you're useless to me.
Chuck Palahniuk
The lucky ones are just born dead.
Chuck Palahniuk
There's still a thousand places I haven't gone to die.
Chuck Palahniuk
You’ve thrown down the gauntlet. You’ve brought my wrath down upon your house. Now, to prove that I exist I must kill you. As the child outlives the father, so must the character bury the author. If you are, in fact, my continuing author, then killing you will end my existence as well. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living.But… If I destroy you and your dreck script, and I still exist… then my existence will be glorious, for I will become my own master.
Chuck Palahniuk
The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize you only lived on paper. Your only adventures were make-believe, and while the world fought and kissed, you sat in some dark room masturbating and making money.
Chuck Palahniuk
Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains.
Chuck Palahniuk
It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.
Chuck Palahniuk
Reality means you live until you die...the real truth is nobody wants reality.
Chuck Palahniuk
I don't want to die without any scars.
Chuck Palahniuk
If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?
Chuck Palahniuk
A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?""Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.
Chuck Palahniuk
Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy.
Chuck Palahniuk
The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.'Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.
Chuck Palahniuk
It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
Chuck Palahniuk
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
Chuck Palahniuk
If you're male, and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And sometimes you find your father in your career.
Chuck Palahniuk
It sounds as if you'd like to be God.
Chuck Palahniuk
I am the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.
Chuck Palahniuk
Nobody wants to worship you if you have the same problems, the same bad breath and messy hair and hangnails, as a regular person. You have to be everything regular people aren’t. Where they fail, you have to go all the way. Be what people are too afraid to be. Become whom they admire. People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser. When it comes to choosing a savior, they won't settle for just a human being.
Chuck Palahniuk
Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.
Chuck Palahniuk
If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
Chuck Palahniuk
I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off.
Chuck Palahniuk
Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.
Chuck Palahniuk
The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of theaudience.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Chuck Palahniuk
some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.
Chuck Palahniuk
Because supposedly those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
Chuck Palahniuk