Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.

No mat­ter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.

I write compulsively. I've got so many ideas, and I love to do it so much, I can't not do it. I write the way some people do drugs.

An important part of building a new culture was allowing people to complain about their past. At first, the more they complained, the worse the past would seem. But by venting, people could start to resolve the past. By bitching and bitching and bitching, they could exhaust the drama of their own horror stories. Grow bored. Only then could they accept a new story for their lives. Move forward.

Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

It is a hundred-year-old witch book, bound in human skin and probably written in ancient cum...YOU lick it!

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

In truth, the degree of anyone's success depends on how often they can say the word yes and hear the word no.

Do you remember when you were 10 or 11 years old and you really thought your folks were the best? They were completely omniscient and you took their word for everything. And then you got older and you went through this hideous age when suddenly they were the devil, they were bullies, and they didn't know anything.

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher.

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

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

What we think of as Halloween is really the product of media barons, city mayors, and candy-makers. You know, before the 1920s, Halloween was really a terrible, terrible night.

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.

I learned all those jokes in second grade. Second grade is really where they tell you those horrific jokes, racist jokes and misogynistic jokes that you have no idea what they mean, and you just memorize them because they have a very strong effect, they make people laugh in this kind of nervous, horrible way, and it's only later that you realize that you've got a head full of crap.

Everyone holds a certain type of power. For young people, it's their youth, their attractiveness, and their energy. But they're terrified that as those qualities fade, what are they going to replace that form of power with?

The evil queen was stupid to play Snow White's game. There's an age where a woman has to move on to another kind of power. Money, for example. Or a gun.

That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you’d never want to own or do another thing. That if you could eat or sleep enough, you’d never need more. That if enough people loved you, you’d stop needing love.

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

We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

Seek midday nourishment. Visit memorial acclaimed war hero Colonel Sanders.

Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.

Ultimately, everyone is acting out of what they feel is the best choice. In a way, they're all trying to improve the world. And I think that those basic choices make the world a better place.

Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.

My books are always about someone obtaining a power to replace the previous sort of power that they held.

Jump way back to one time, Evie and me did this fashion shoot in a junk yard, in a slaughterhouse, in a mortuary. We'd go anywhere to look good by comparison, and what I realize is mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.

You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel strong. You save people by letting them save you.

Where I'm is one of those stair climbing machines the agent has installed. You climb and climb forever and never get off the ground. You're trapped in your hotel room. It's the mystical sweat love lodge experience of our time, the only sort of Indian vision quest we can schedule into our daily planner.Our Stair Master to Heaven.

Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit.

For six months I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.

Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

You realize you have no control over how you're perceived.

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

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.

It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.

About my boss, Tyler tells me, if I'm really angry, I should go to the post office and fill out a change-of-address card and have all his mail forwarded to Rugby, North Dakota.

You couldn't have small, dying children in a movie without really bringing everyone down, but you can in comics.

The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact.

If you make people laugh too much, their blood becomes - I believe it is acidic as opposed to alkaline. It changes the oxygen level in the blood, and people are likelier to pass out at that point.

Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.

You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing 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 the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.

I don't want to die without any scars.

This is our world now, and those ancient people are dead.

What kind of dining set defines me as a person?

His saliva tasted like the wet dicks of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.

There is nothing special in the world. nothing magic. just physics.

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.