Chuck Palahniuk - People Quotes

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I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.

Chuck Palahniuk
When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.

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
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
Some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.

Chuck Palahniuk
You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buy s a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound. You don't win with a lot of treble.

Chuck Palahniuk
There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.

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
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
In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.

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

Chuck Palahniuk
People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

Chuck Palahniuk
Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished.

Chuck Palahniuk
I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television.

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

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
In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.

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
We're all trapped. It's always 1734. All of us, we're stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic.

Chuck Palahniuk
The journalist researches a story. The novelist imagines it.
What's funny is, you'd be amazed at the amount of time a novelist has to spend with people in order to create this single lonely voice. This seemingly isolated world.
It's hard to call any of my novels fiction.

Chuck Palahniuk
Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday.

Chuck Palahniuk
The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don't die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.

Chuck Palahniuk
Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950's. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

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
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
You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel strong. You save people by letting them save you.

Chuck Palahniuk
Now this is the first rule of fight club: There is nothing a blue collar Nobody in Oregon with a public school education can imagine that a million-billion people haven't already done...

Chuck Palahniuk
Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need.

Chuck Palahniuk
Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE.

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