Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,' he says, 'the same way this theater seems to digest people.' With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky and growing mold, branched with arms and legs.Other events—the ones you can’t digest—they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can’t talk about, they rot you from the inside out. Until you’re Cassandra’s wet shadow on the ground. Sunk in your own yellow protein mud.But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell—you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good. Those are stories as important as food. Those are stories you can use to make people laugh or cry or sick. Or scared. To make people feel the way you felt. To help exhaust that past moment for them and for you. Until that moment is dead.Consumed. Digested. Absorbed.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

As human beings, our first commandment is:Something needs to happen

~ Chuck Palahniuk

[W]hat makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

They told me that nothing was a sin, just a poor life choice. Poor impulse control. That nothing is evil. Any concept of right versus wrong, according to them, is merely a cultural construct relative to one specific time and place. They said that if anything should force us to modify our personal behavior it should be our allegiance to a social contract, not some vague, externally imposed threat of flaming punishment.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

You have to give up! you have to give up!You have to realize that someday you will die,Until you know that, you are useless!

~ Chuck Palahniuk

According lecture, entire effort United States to incite desire, inflict want, inspire demand.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

... the first step to eternal live is you have to die.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

What makes the earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it ought to feel like Heaven.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

In all seriousness, Archer claims that if you, as a living, alive person, hear the song You're the One That I Want from the musical Grease three times in a single day - seemingly by accident, whether in an elevator, on a radio, a telephone hold button, or whatever - it indicates that you'll surely die before sunset.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

In capitalist nation, all is decided by money.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Maybe God left it up to people to develop the ability to bring back Christ into their lives. Maybe God wanted us to invent our own savior when we were ready. When we need it most. Denny says maybe it's up to us to create our own messiah. To save ourselves.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Listening, it occurred to Randall that the love people feel for animals is the purest form of love. Loving an animal, a horse, cat, or dog, was always a romantic tragedy. It meant loving something that would die before you. Like that movie with Ali McGraw. There was no future, just the affection of the present moment. You didn't expect a big payoff, someday.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Fathers. Mothers. With all their caring and attention. They will f--- you up, every time.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit.

~ 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 toally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

No, I say, it's fine.Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains. Just great, I say. Really.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

She said when a boy and a girl dog copulate, the head of the boy's penis swells and the vaginal muscles of the girl constrict. Even after sex, both dogs remain locked together, helpless and miserable for a brief period of time.The Mommy said this same scenario described most marriages.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

During the Cold War of the 1950s, American spies were issued eyeglasses with thick, clunky frames. If captured, they were trained to casually chew the curved earpieces, where fatal doses of cyanide were cast inside the plastic. It's these same horn-rimmed suicide glasses, the wrangler says, that inspired the look of Buddy Holly and Elvis Costello. All those young hipsters wearing death on their nose.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill

~ Chuck Palahniuk

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

My mom would spy by satellite, turning down the air conditioning, colder and colder, with a tapping keystroke via her wireless connection, chilling that house, that one room, meat locker cold, ski-slope cold, spending a king's ransom on Freon and electric power, trying to make some doomed ten bucks' worth of pretty pink flowers last one more day.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Prepare to evacuate soul in ten, in nine, eight.Chloe's splashing through the ankle-deep back-up of renal fluid from her failed kidneys.Death will commence in five.Five, four.Around her, a parasitic life spray paints her heart.Four, three.Three, two.Chloe climbs hand-over-hand up the curled lining of her own throat.Death to commence in three, two.Moonlight shines in through the open mout...h.Prepare for the last breath, now.Evacuate.Now.Soul clear of body.Death commences.Now.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

And the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I'm wondering how clean this gun is.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

One minute was enough, Tyler said, 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.

~ Chuck Palahniuk