Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Your past is just a story. And once you realise this, it has no power over you.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a stamp that said DEAD. The caseworker told me this a few years ago when the suicides started back up again. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. This is how things get recycled.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God’s most selfish children would steal God’s greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.Only God has the right to surprise His children with death.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Suicide is very contagious.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Put the gun to my head and paint walls with my brains.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

How miserably hypocritical, you might say, but no sooner am I offered a chance to flee Hell than I yearn to stay. Few families hold their relations as closely as do prisons. Few marriages sustain the high level of passion that exists between criminals and those who seek to bring them to justice. It’s no wonder the Zodiac Killer flirted so relentlessly with the police. Or that Jack the Ripper courted and baited detectives with his - or her - coy letters. We all wish to be pursued. We all long to be desired.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I refuse to give readers an uplifting faux experience engineered to comfort them and perpetuate the sociopolitical and economic status quo.Who died and made you Bertolt Brecht?

~ Chuck Palahniuk

A woman calls from Seaview to say her linen closet is missing. Last September, her house had six bedrooms, two linen closets. She's sure of it. Now she's only got one. She comes to open her beach house for the summer. She drives out from the city with the kids and the nanny and the dog, and here they are with all heir luggage, and their towels are gone. Disappeared. Poof. Bermuda triangulated.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Where would Jesus be if no one ever wrote the gospels?

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.

~ 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

You had a near life experience.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.I have no native tongue.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Since boyhood, fury had become his father. His older brother. His only protector. Fury gave him strength and courage and spurred him to always move forward despite always getting things wrong and always failing and no mentor there to help him or teach him and everyone always laughing. Anger delivered him from catastrophe. Rage kept him from going under. It had come to be his greatest asset and only strategy.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. Until it's too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble. So you just walk home.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Ignorance was bliss.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It's okay if there isn't a God anymore, but I still want to respect something. I don't want to be the center of my own universe

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I'm an invisible monster. I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

You only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.

~ Chuck Palahniuk