Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?

No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.

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.

The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.

Your heart is my piñata.

The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.' A spinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined.

Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.

People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

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.

Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

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.

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.

We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.

Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.

It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.

What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.

We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.

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.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

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.

How torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.

No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way.

The future is just wasted on some people.

Anything you can aquire is only another thing you'll lose.

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.

For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.

First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.

I tiger can smile A snake will say it loves you Lies make us evil

Only after disaster can we be ressurected

There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.

Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit. I am a rock. A jerk. I'm an uncaring asshole and proud of it.

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

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

It's because we're so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and legs everybody has. We're so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we're trained to want.

The truth is, wherever you choose to be, it's the wrong place.

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you'd never stare long enough to get if they'd even just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge.

The first step to eternal life, is you have to die.

Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night.

You can kill a lifetime without feeling anything but skin.

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.

Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?

That's what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can't know I'm its mother. It's so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that's what I love about fire.

On the other side of the handrail, the hallway's gray marble floor looks as if we've climbed a stairway through the clouds.

Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs. That's how beautiful she looks.

Maybe this is why so many serial killers work in pairs. It's nice not to feel alone in a world full of victims or enemies. It's no wonder Waltraud Wagner, the Austrian Angel of Death, convinced her friends to kill with her. It just seems natural. You and me against the world...

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

What I did was pour out about a gallon of Chanel Number Five and put a burning wedding invitation to it, and boom, I'm recycling.

Imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption. People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean. White noise

That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.

Love me, I'll be anybody you want me to be. Use me. Change me. I can be thin with big breasts and big hair. Take me apart. Make me into anything, but just love me

Still, it's nice to have one person who knows all your secrets.

A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

The weather today is an increasing trend towards denial.

Funerals are all abstract ceremony.

The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.

On a night without moon or stars you can't see a thing, but you can imagine anything.