Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

383 Sourced Quotes

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
If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

Chuck Palahniuk
Just each of us being me, me, me first. The murderer, the victim, the witness each of us thinks our role is the lead. Probably that goes for anybody in the world.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
Kids, she says. When they're little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you're the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it's just the opposite. After that, you're either a liar or a fool or a villain.

Chuck Palahniuk
Skin, bones, blood and organs transplant from person to person. Even what's inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you'd die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited. Whatever you're thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they're doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.

Chuck Palahniuk
Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

Chuck Palahniuk
The government says Rant's alive because they need a villain. The kids say he's alive because they need a hero.

Chuck Palahniuk
For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

Chuck Palahniuk
It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.

Chuck Palahniuk
Peter used to say that an artist's job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble.

Chuck Palahniuk
If you haven't already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.
In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus.

Chuck Palahniuk
Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.

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
In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring shape-outlines we have to blink against.

Chuck Palahniuk
I don't know the difference between what I want and what I'm trained to want.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.

Chuck Palahniuk
Somehow it seems wrong to photograph a blind person. It's like stealing something valuable they don't even know they own.

Chuck Palahniuk
Brandy is so attractive you could chop her head off and put it on blue velvet in the window at Tiffany's and somebody would buy it for a million dollars.

Chuck Palahniuk
Yes, and I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smokey eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's the kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive 'let them eat cake' type of chauvinism.

Chuck Palahniuk