Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great War. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.

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

You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away.

If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes.

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

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night.

Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.

We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.

Make me into anything, but just love me.

"Getting fired," Tyler says, "is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we’d quit treading water and do something with our lives."

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

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.

Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.

If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.

The most boring scenes are the scenes where a character is alone.

Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things - they save you.

Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories.

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher.

It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.

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

Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell.

Because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?

What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.

Your heart is my piñata.

I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?

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

We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.

I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

As if you cut open a rag doll with a sill name, and found inside:Real intestines, real lungs, a beating heart and blood. A lot of hot, sticky blood.

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

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.

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

The world of American politics is more contentious than it has ever been in my lifetime.

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.