Chuck Palahniuk

Quotes

A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
Someone bent on suicide won't have much sense of humor left.
Which is worse: Hell or nothing?
If you could be God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.
This is why I loved the support groups so much. If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention. If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. And when they spoke, they weren't telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.
We just had a near-life experience!
On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.
With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the gun between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels.
Masochism is a valuable job skill.
When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you'd never stare long enough to get if she'd ever just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge.
It happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated.
You can't base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future.
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 it up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.
The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.
Hysteria is only possible with an audience.
On game shows, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer dryer pair.
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.
The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.
The idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.
The most boring thing in the entire world is nudity. The second most boring thing is honesty.
Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying?
Who you are moment to moment is just a story.
Your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.
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.
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.
When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.
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.
It's not living alone if you keep a rifle under the bed.
The things you own end up owning you.
We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives.
Being tired isn't the same as being rich, but most times it's close enough.
It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.