Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

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

“Who I was before the accident is just a story now. Everything before now, before now, before now, is just a story I carry around. I guess that would apply to anybody in the world. What I need is a new story about who I am.”

“Most times, it’s just a lot easier not to let the world know what’s wrong.”

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

“Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.”

You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.

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

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.

A person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.

It’s not love or anything, but I think I like you, too.

At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

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

You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet.

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

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected.

We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact.

If you don’t claim your humanity you will become a statistic.

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

I don’t want to die without any scars.

The things you used to own, now they own you.

Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.

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

You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We’re all part of the same compost heap.

If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t.

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

“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.”

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”

“Because beauty is power the way money is power the way a loaded gun is power.”

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.”

“…It helps to know you’re not any more responsible for how you look than a car is. You’re a product just as much. A product of a product of a product...”

“When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”

“…If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible…”

“We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”

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

“Your perception is all f****d up. All you can talk about is trash that’s already happened. You can’t base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future.”

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”

Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.

The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly.

Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.