Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

383 Sourced Quotes

You can't base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future.

Chuck Palahniuk
What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
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.

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
Get married before the sex gets boring or you'll never get married.

Chuck Palahniuk
All human beings search for either reasons to be good, or excuses to be bad.

Chuck Palahniuk
I think they've always gone on. I've gotten some irate letters from oldsters saying "We did this in the 1930s. You didn't invent anything." And I'm like, "Gramps, you should have put a name on it and sold it, because that's all I did."

Chuck Palahniuk
We're so structured and micromanaged, this isn't a world anymore, it's a damn cruise ship.

Chuck Palahniuk
Angel says that rich people don't like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.

Chuck Palahniuk
If we can forgive what's been done to us... If we can forgive what we've done to others... If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.

Chuck Palahniuk
This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
What makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

Chuck Palahniuk
With my eyes closed, I ask if she knows how this will all turn out. "Long-term or short-term?" she asks. Both. "Long-term," she says, "we're all going to die. Then our bodies will rot. No surprise there. Short-term, we're going to live happily ever after." Really? "Really," she says. "So don't sweat it.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
Dude, the place is filling up," I say. "It feels like we're living in the bottom half of an hourglass." Like somehow we're running out of time.

Chuck Palahniuk
I do hereby and forever abandon abandoning all hope. Honestly, I give up on giving up. I'm just not cut out to be some hopeless, disillusioned wretch with no aspirations for the rest of the eternity, sprawled catatonic in my own feces on a cold stone floor. In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple of days of hopelessness. Future scientists would call it Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case of history chasing rainbows.

Chuck Palahniuk
Every high school has its Romeo and Juliet, one tragic couple. So does every generation.

Chuck Palahniuk
I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn't see any way to change things. Only end them.

Chuck Palahniuk
The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn't know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.

Chuck Palahniuk
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.

Chuck Palahniuk
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.

Chuck Palahniuk
Some little part of themselves for someone in the future to discover. Maybe a thought. We were here. We built this. A reminder.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
The greatest weapon any warrior can carry into battle is absolute certainty of her eternal soul.

Chuck Palahniuk
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.

Chuck Palahniuk