Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

The only way that America can protect its prosperity and political stability will be to depopulate the Third World? Should we be surprised that the AIDS virus showed up about 1975? Do you understand what the term depopulate means?

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you’d been reading.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.What it's going to be, I don't know.Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.And maybe knowing isn't the point.Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

If you never been rabid, you ain't never lived.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

When they were in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like 'Saint George and the Dragon' or 'The Rape of the Sabine Women,' but the angle you use, the lighting, the composition, the technique, they're all you. You are every color and brushstroke.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The future you have, tomorrow, won't be the same future you had, yesterday.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The future is just wasted on some people.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

At this rate, we'll never get to the future.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior. Each of those three traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped-up tests to build a child's faith and imagination. The first test is to believe in a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust in a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: To believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money. From a man to an animal to a fairy. From toys to candy to money. Thus, interestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairy-dom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickels... dimes... and quarters. In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as he or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe 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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

In a world where vows are worthless.Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I used to be such a nice person.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

These are Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I am Tyler's mouth. I am Tyler's hands.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It sounds trite, but only because words make everything true sound trite. Because words always screw up what you're trying to say.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Here in the bathroom with me are razor blades. Here is iodine to drink. Here are sleeping pills to swallow. You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you reenlist.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Only after disaster can we be resurrected.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

they all think men are obsolete. useless. as if we're just some sexual appendix.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

She kept hoping that something would happen to rescue her from her own small-scale, predictable dreams.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

We ourselves, will resurrect the memory in order to savor it and carry it forth into the world. We will fling it at one another for laughs. Distort it. We will toss the story into the air at parties and howl over its ripeness. Degraded as it was, we will degrade it further. Make it more swollen. We shall render it impossibly awful, making of it the mythology of ourselves. A comfort. Proof of the trials we've survived.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Aim low and you won't be disappointed.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I am the cause of all my upsets. I am my worst enemy.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

You know that old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

You'd be surprised just how fast you can close the door on your past. Learn needlepoint. Make a stained-glass lamp.

~ Chuck Palahniuk