Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell.

You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm.

When you reach the end of your life - trust me, you won't look back and savor the moments you spent alone.

If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.

You always kill the one you love.

This is less teaching than damage control. You may as well paint a house that’s on fire.

Want to talk third-wave feminism, you could cite Ariel Levy and the idea that women have internalized male oppression. Going to spring break at Fort Lauderdale, getting drunk, and flashing your breasts isn't an act of personal empowerment. It's you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to even know she's in distress.

Fertility says, "Can you relax and just let things happen?" I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen? "And Joy," she says, "and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment." She says all the wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "You don't have to control everything," she says. "You can't control everything." But you can be ready for disaster. A sign goes by saying, Buckle Up. "If you worry about disaster all of the time, that's what you are going to get," Fertility says.

Most guys will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you're a real person, and some will just ignore you." The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic.

We're all of us haunted and haunting.

She's so thin she's either dying or rich.

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

The last story you should write is the most important story. You should start with a story that is just an amusing, entertaining, fun story to write and learn your writing chops with the least important things before you start applying them to the most important things.

Everyone's in their own personal coma.

When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.

You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.

Every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?

I'm sorry if this all seems a little rushed and desperate. It is.

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 came to Party Crashing because accidents happen. People you love will die. Nothing you treasure will last forever. And I need to accept and embrace that fact.

When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?

The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.

Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away. That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.

Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them.

This isn't about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.

What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to bw wrong?

At this rate, we'll never get to the future.

We are a nation of physical animals who have forgotten how much we enjoy being that. We are cushioned by this kind of make-believe, unreal world and have no idea what we can survive because we are never challenged or tested.

Potassium cyanide," says the talent wrangler as she leans over to pick up a paper napkin off the floor. "Found naturally in the cassava or manioc roots native to Africa, used to tint architectural blueprints in the form of the deep-blue pigment known as Prussian blue. Hence the shade 'cyan' blue.

The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point.

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.

There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with.

More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can't stop.

I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.

I'm fascinated by the whole issue of arousal addiction, which seems to be mostly a problem for young men.

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

No matter how bad things get, you can still walk away.

Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.

Maybe this is why Misty loved him. Loved you. Because you believed in her so much more than she did. You expected more from her than she did from herself.

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.

I believe in something. But I don't believe that anything can hold a grudge for long enough to condemn its creation to eternal punishment. Nobody can hold a grudge that long, even God.

If you're not drunk and half naked by this point, you're not paying attention.

Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born?

Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn't bother to torture you if she didn't.

I'm not sure what we're running from. Nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up. Getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if running we won't have to get on with our lives.

I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.

Yes, I kidnapped that Lindberg baby.