Chuck Palahniuk - Life Quotes

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Be famous. Be a big social experiment in getting what you don't want. Find value in what we've been taught is worthless. Find good in what the world says is evil. I'm giving you my life because I want the whole world to know you. I wish the whole world would embrace what it hates. Find what you're afraid of most and go live there.

Chuck Palahniuk
I'm living the life I love, I tell myself, and loving the life I live. I tell myself: I deserved this. This is exactly what I wanted.

Chuck Palahniuk
The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize you only lived on paper. Your only adventures were make-believe, and while the world fought and kissed, you sat in some dark room masturbating and making money.

Chuck Palahniuk
We'd turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we'd survive to talk about.

Chuck Palahniuk
I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything.

Chuck Palahniuk
At That Moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay. It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

Chuck Palahniuk
When you're thinking about the rest of your life, you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.

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

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

Chuck Palahniuk
No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.

Chuck Palahniuk
With every lecture, you're forced to look again at every choice you've made over the lesson-by-lesson chain of your entire life. And after all these years, you see how little you have to work with, how limited your life and education have been. How scant was your courage and curiosity. Not to mention your expectations.

Chuck Palahniuk
What they don't teach you in art school is how your whole life is about discovering who you already were.

Chuck Palahniuk
After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

Chuck Palahniuk
That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

Chuck Palahniuk
Just let yourself be broken and humiliated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry...

Chuck Palahniuk
Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.

Chuck Palahniuk
Imagine how you'd feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn't stand.

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
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
Without just one nest
A bird can call the world home
Life is your career

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
Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

Chuck Palahniuk
All my friends with PalmPilots and cell phones, they're always calling themselves and leaving reminders to themselves about what's about to happen. We leave Post-it notes for ourselves. We go to that shop in the mall, the one where they engrave whatever shit you want on a silver-plated box or a fountain pen, and we get a reminder for every special event that life goes by too fast for us to remember. We buy those picture frames where you record a message on a sound chip. We videotape everything! Oh, and now there's those digital cameras, so we can all email around our photos — this century's equivalent of the boring vacation slide show. We organize and reorganize. We record and archive.

Chuck Palahniuk
The bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life. Our real discoveries come from chaos. - Brandy Alexander

Chuck Palahniuk
Nevertheless, if you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. A child allows us to revisit the excitement we once felt about, well... everything. A generation later, our grandkids bump up our enthusiasm yet again. Reproducing is a kind of booster shot to keep us loving life.

Chuck Palahniuk
There's always the chance you could die right in the middle of your life story.

Chuck Palahniuk
The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.

Chuck Palahniuk
It simply makes sense that I should miss my parents more than they miss me, especially when you consider that they only loved me for thirteen years while I loved them my entire life.

Chuck Palahniuk
Sobriety is okay enough," Denny says, "but someday, I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know?

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