Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

What's up with you? How come you're being like this?' Because it's the truth. This is the world we live in.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Le stelle in cieloNon conoscono l'iraBla, bla, bla, fine

~ Chuck Palahniuk

What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

That’s the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you’d be ruined. Overdosed on information.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

For official record, if become bankrupt old retail distribution centers-labeled supermega, so-enlarged foodstuff market- later reincarnate to become worship shrine. First sell food-stuff, next then same structure sell battered furnitures, next now born as gymnasium club, next broker flea markets, only at final end of life...sell religions.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they'd leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a source of meat. These islands, they were pristine. These were home to breeds of birds with no natural predators. Breeds of birds that lived nowhere else on earth. The plants there, without enemies they evolved without thorns or poisons. Without predators and enemies, these islands, they were paradise. The sailors, the next time they visited these islands, the only things still there would be herds of goats or pigs. Oyster is telling this story. The sailors called this seeding meat. Oyster says, Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the ol' Adam and Eve story? Looking out the car window, he says, You ever wonder when God's coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Some people still think knowledge is power.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

After long enough, everyone in the world will be you enemy.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Yes, I kidnapped that Lindberg baby.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce a risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book. . . . A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a mass medium. No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

A book is as private and consensual as sex.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Advertising has these people chassing 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 culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Therefore, when we neglect to fear such a brittle monstrosity, we render it powerless.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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

~ Chuck Palahniuk

There are worse things you can do to people you love than kill them.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the centre of attention but completely cut off from participating with anyone else. You're the corpse in an English murder mystery.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

No, whether a woman is a concubine to fuck or a damsel to redeem, she's always just some passive object to fulfill a man's purpose.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

There are lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

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.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power, the same way money is power, the same way a gun is power.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Prepare to evacuate soul in five, in four, three, two, one.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Art never comes from happiness.

~ Chuck Palahniuk