240 Quotes by Chuck Palahniuk

A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. (Quote Meaning)

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken. (Meaning)

The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. (Quote Meaning)

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives. (Meaning)

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open. (Quote Meaning)

I am Jack's smirking revenge. (Meaning)

You are not your job. (Quote Meaning)

We are not special. (Meaning)

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will. (Quote Meaning)

Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.

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Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot, who calls you back when you hang up on him, who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat, or will stay awake just to watch you sleep... Wait for the boy who kisses your forehead, who wants to show you off to the world when you are in sweats, who holds your hand in front of his friends, who thinks you're just as pretty without makeup on. One who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares and how lucky his is to have you....The one who turns to his friends and says, 'that's her.'

If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes.

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known. (Meaning)

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. (Quote Meaning)

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

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.

Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night.

Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.

Make me into anything, but just love me. (Meaning)

Your past is just a story. And once you realize this, it has no power over you. (Meaning)

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Find joy in everything you choose to do. (Quote Meaning)

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring. (Meaning)

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things - they save you.

It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.

Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories.

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.

When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves. (Meaning)

What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up? (Quote Meaning)

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.

If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't. (Meaning)

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

I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables.

Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.

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

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.

The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

A good story should change the way you see the world. (Meaning)

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.

There's a big difference between "not caring" or being "nihilistic" about a topic and simply not being enrolled by the drama presented by other people. Just because my characters choose not to react in standard, socially-appropriate ways - that does not mean they don't care. They just reject ordinary dramas.

People don’t want their lives fixed. They want to be validated. (Quote Meaning)

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.

May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.

Everyone thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation.

We live and we die and anything else is just a delusion.

Having nothing to lose is the new wealth.

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

When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

This is your life and its ending one moment at a time. (Meaning)

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

Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.

Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.

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

What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.

I don't want to die without any scars.

Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?

If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?

If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.

Intellectual culture seems to separate high art from low art. Low art is horror or pornography or anything that has a physical component to it and engages the reader on a visceral level and evokes a strong sympathetic reaction. High art is people driving in Volvos and talking a lot. I just don't want to keep those things separate. I think you can use visceral physical experiences to illustrate larger ideas, whether they're emotional or spiritual. I'm trying to not exclude high and low art or separate them.

Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your life fixing. (Meaning)

When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.

When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you'd never stare long enough to get if they'd even just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge.

Because after you've crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them. And there's no escaping from constant escape. Distracting ourselves. Avoiding confrontation. Getting past the moment. Jacking off. Television. Denial.

On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

I just don't want to die without a few scars.

Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

Real smarts begin when you quit quoting other people.

If you worry about disaster all the time, that's what you're going to get.

By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are…Or we can decide for ourselves.

Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.

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

Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs. That's how beautiful she looks.

It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

People don't listen, they just wait for their turn to talk.

Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. (Quote Meaning)

You couldn't have small, dying children in a movie without really bringing everyone down, but you can in comics.

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.

It only takes one mistake and nothing else you ever do will matter. No matter how hard you work or how smart you become, you'll always be known for that one poor choice.

Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.

No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you choose, you'll never be totally happy.

If You Don’t Claim Your Humanity, You Will Become A Statistic. (Meaning)

You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life.

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.

Recycling and speed limits are bullshit. They're like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.

Everyone holds a certain type of power. For young people, it's their youth, their attractiveness, and their energy. But they're terrified that as those qualities fade, what are they going to replace that form of power with?

Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit.

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

To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days.

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

When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.

You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. 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. We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.

When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? (Meaning)

There are the most fantastic, beautiful things and people out there. It’s up to you to find them.

Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born?

Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.

Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.

A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.

Help me give up my addiction to Hope.

Books can create a depth of story, a background of information and ideas, that television and movies can't. Sure, the television shows may shock, but only on a superficial level. They'd never risk market share to really explore the issues. They report, but don't analyze or suggest any new ways for living our lives.

Without animals, there would be no humanity. In a world of just people, people will mean nothing.

Some of us are lucky enough to fall in love once or twice but the luckiest of us are those who find that someone they simply can't live without and have the pleasure of falling in love with them day in and day out for the rest of their lives. Relationships aren't about simply falling in love once and being done with it, they're about loving someone until the end of your days and growing that love endlessly.

Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.

I'm always identifying some fallacy in my own life. I'm sort of making fun of myself by exploring and unpacking just why I'm sort of automatically thrown to be a certain way.

You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.

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

You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception. Think of deep outer space, the incredible cold and quiet where your wife and kid wait. Silence, not heaven, would be reward enough.

If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?

If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can.

This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. (Meaning)

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.

My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.

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.

If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.

The damaged love the damaged. True fact.

You spend your entire life becoming God and then you die.

Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. (Meaning)

You realize you have no control over how you're perceived. (Quote Meaning)

History is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.

The answer is there is no answer. (Meaning)

I always really curious to see how people interpret things. I know my version, and I'm kind of bored with my version so I want to see their version.

Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash.

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

We're all going overnight express delivery straight to Hell.

My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.

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.

In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was kind of tumbler. The sale as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. This isn't suffering. It's erosion.

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

By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.

You gain power by pretending to be weak.

These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

You can say anything if enough people will listen.

I tiger can smile A snake will say it loves you Lies make us evil

His computer password is "password.

All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired. (Meaning)

Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them.

The only thing that separates us from the animals... is we have pornography.

What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.

The things you used to own, now they own you. (Meaning)

Tyler lies back and asks, "If Marilyn Monroe were alive right now, what would she be doing?" I say, goodnight. The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling and Tyler says, "Clawing at the lid of her coffin.

I'm not sure what we're running from. Nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up. Getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if running we won't have to get on with our lives.

For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

She's not wearing makeup so her face just looks like skin.

Find good in what the world says is evil.

If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.

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.

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

It's the Marilyn Monroe school of medicine where enough of any drug will cure any disease.

It only takes one mistake,' the Dan Banyan guy says, 'and nothing else you ever do will matter.' With his empty hand, he takes one of my hands. His fingers feel hot, fever-hot, and pounding with his heartbeats. He turns my hand palm-up saying, 'No matter how hard you work or how smart you become, you'll always be known for that one poor choice.' He sets the blue pill on my palm, saying, 'Do that one wrong thing- and you'll be dead for the rest of your life.

You see, life only turns out good or bad for only a little bit. And then it turns out some other way.

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.

The liberator who destroys my property is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free.

What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.

No, none of us seem so very real. We're only supporting characters in the lives of each other. Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.

Nothing feels as awful as pouring your heart out to some talk therapist, then realizing this so-called professional is actually vastly stupid and you've just professed your most secret secrets to some goon who's wearing one brown sock and one blue sock.

The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.

This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.

It's not love or anything, but I think I like you, too. (Meaning)

There will always be an underground.

There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.

How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?

Life is short, death is forever (Meaning)

Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?

This isn't about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.

The best fights don't occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.

What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to be wrong?

How you're still always trapped. How your head is the cave, your eyes the cave mouth. How you live inside your head and only see what you want. How you only watch the shadows and make up your own meaning.

Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.

Which is worse, hell or nothing? (Meaning)

You ever wonder if Adam and Eve were just the puppies God dumped because they wouldn't house-train?

"Without just one nest

A bird can call the world home

Life is your career"

If you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane.

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.

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

When you reach the end of your life - trust me, you won't look back and savor the moments you spent alone.

The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.

New carpet will exude poisonous formaldehyde for up to two years after it'd been laid. I know the feeling.

Someday you will die, and until you know that, you're useless to me.

It is a hundred-year-old witch book, bound in human skin and probably written in ancient cum...YOU lick it!

The joke is, we all have the same punchline.

Want to talk third-wave feminism, you could cite Ariel Levy and the idea that women have internalized male oppression. Going to spring break at Fort Lauderdale, getting drunk, and flashing your breasts isn't an act of personal empowerment. It's you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to even know she's in distress.

I'm only confrontational with my friends.

If you're going to read this, don't bother. (Meaning)

Why do I do anything?' she says. 'I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream.

I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.

You cannot be the person they know and the great, glorious person you want to become. Not at the same time.

There are only patterns. Patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns, patterns hidden by patterns, patterns within patterns.

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

Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

Optimism is the first symptom that any disease is fatal.

No matter how bad things get, you can still walk away.

Scratch any fortune and you'll find blood only a generation or two back...child labor in mines or mills...Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.

Regret, Daisy knew, was the only confirmation of a well-lived life. If you didn't occasionally go too far, you weren't going anywhere.

It can only take a moment to waste the rest of your life. (Meaning)

Anything you can acquire is only another thing you'll lose.

Who you are moment to moment is just a story.

And if you believe that we really have free will, then you know that God can't really control us. And since God can't control us, all God does is watch and change channels when He gets bored.

Art never comes from happiness. (Meaning)

Rant Casey used to say, "No matter what happens, it's always now..." Talk about cryptic. I think what Rant meant was, we live in the present moment of reality, and no matter what's come before, no matter how much we loved a person or a dog, when it attacks us we'll react to that moment of danger.

Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother.

We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.

Imagine a plague you catch through your ears.

You realize that there's no point in doing anything if nobody's watching. You wonder, if there had been a low turnout at the crucifixion, would they have rescheduled?

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.

I believe in something. But I don't believe that anything can hold a grudge for long enough to condemn its creation to eternal punishment. Nobody can hold a grudge that long, even God.

To repeat, the way you get to the huge, impossible yes is, you start collecting a lot of easy, small yeses.

This is less teaching than damage control. You may as well paint a house that’s on fire.

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.

Tell the world what scares you most. Save the world with some advice from the future.

There is nothing special in the world. nothing magic. just physics.

you're a product just as much. a product of a product. the people who design cars, they're products, your teachers, products. the minister in your church, another product.

What if reality is nothing but some disease?

There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.

Everything you see is based on fact of a event thats already happen, Even light only travels so fast.

I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful.

Some people still think knowledge is power.

As a lower-class kid, I was raised to think success would be owning stuff. Having that great job, too. Now I find my parents' dream was wrong. You never really own anything. And you're never really finished as a person.

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.

Writers should be able to fully deduct from their taxes all writing-related expenses, including alcohol, parking tickets, court judgments, fines for lewd public behavior, Zoloft, and cigarettes.

You have to keep recycling yourself.

The most boring thing in the entire world is nudity. The second most boring thing is honesty.

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.

Doesn't reincarnation strike you as just another form of procrastination?

If your body is a temple, you can pile up too much deferred maintenance. If your body is a temple, mine was a real fixer-upper.