Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

383 Sourced Quotes

Unless we have that moment of chaos, followed by the emotional release of realization, nothing will be remembered.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history's in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
Being tired isn't the same as being rich, but most times it's close enough.

Chuck Palahniuk
They should let some people into the library by prescription only

Chuck Palahniuk
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.

Chuck Palahniuk
Because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.

Chuck Palahniuk
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.

Chuck Palahniuk
The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.

Chuck Palahniuk
Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.

Chuck Palahniuk
According to Plato, we don't learn anything. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything. Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know.

Chuck Palahniuk
Or maybe...just maybe this whole process is our training wheels towards something bigger. If we can reflect and know our lives, we might stay awake and shape our futures.

Chuck Palahniuk
It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

Chuck Palahniuk
We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

Chuck Palahniuk
Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.

Chuck Palahniuk
The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

Chuck Palahniuk
The tiny space, the toilet, two hundred strangers just a few inches away, it's so exciting, the lack of room to maneuver, it helps if you're double-jointed. Use your imagination. Some creativity and a few simple stretching exercises and you can be knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. You'll be amazed how time flies.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
In good old Colonial Dunsboro, masochism is a valuable job skill. It is in most jobs.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
Listen up. Rant would tell people: 'You're a different human being to everybody you meet.' Sometimes Rant said, 'You only ever is in the eyes of other folks.' If you were going to carve a quote on his grave, his favorite saying was: 'The future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday.

Chuck Palahniuk
And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.

Chuck Palahniuk
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.

Chuck Palahniuk
Your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.

Chuck Palahniuk
Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.

Chuck Palahniuk
People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and adressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. [...] The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

Chuck Palahniuk
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.

Chuck Palahniuk
A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.

Chuck Palahniuk
Griping isn't the same as creating something. Rebelling isn't rebuilding. Ridiculing isn't replacing. We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

Chuck Palahniuk