Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

382 Sourced Quotes

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

Chuck Palahniuk
I figure if Eve could get us into this mess, I could get us out. After all, God really likes to see a go-getter.

Chuck Palahniuk
People die', she says. 'People tear down houses. But furniture, fine, beautiful furniture, it just goes on and on, surviving everything.' She says, 'Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
No way could I fall in love. I just couldn't go there yet. Settle for less. I didn't want to process through anything. I didn't want to pick up any pieces. Lower my expectations.

Chuck Palahniuk
How sweet! You still believe in death... that's just so... quaint. Well, sorry to pop your death bubble, but there's no such thing. So make the best of things. Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking. Don't waste good drugs on killing yourself. Share them with friends and have a party. Or send them to me.

Chuck Palahniuk
You see, life only turns out good or bad for only a little bit. And then it turns out some other way.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
We all have this moment, when your folks first see you as someone not growing up to be them.

Chuck Palahniuk
She drank a glass of wine and looked for something new to ruin with her lack of talent.

Chuck Palahniuk
It's the Marilyn Monroe school of medicine where enough of any drug will cure any disease.

Chuck Palahniuk
I love being with people. But I need a script, a role, something that will help me overcome my fears of rejection and shame. Most religions and belief systems provide a blueprint for some sort of community. And the religion's leaders model a way of being. For example, in my book Choke, a character enacts his own death and resurrection every night – as does the narrator in Fight Club. Here's Jesus, allowing himself to look terrible in front of his peers. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public.

Chuck Palahniuk
A knife, it felt like a knife, and I'd discovered that despite everything that's happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.

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
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.

Chuck Palahniuk
Everybody looks a little crazy if you're looking close enough and if you can't look that close, then you don't really love them.

Chuck Palahniuk
What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God.

Chuck Palahniuk
At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor.

Chuck Palahniuk
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.

Chuck Palahniuk
Nothing feels as awful as pouring your heart out to some talk therapist, then realizing this so-called professional is actually vastly stupid and you've just professed your most secret secrets to some goon who's wearing one brown sock and one blue sock.

Chuck Palahniuk
Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.

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
It's a fun playtime. Please, don't kill it with big words.

Chuck Palahniuk