Top 1089 Quotes & Sayings by Chuck Palahniuk
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Chuck Palahniuk.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
What we don't understand we can make mean anything.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
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.
There will always be an underground.
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?
The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.
The answer is there is no answer.
If there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie.
To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
Once religion has been dismissed by primarily an intellectual class of people, we lose the really useful social functions of religion... What replaces it might be worse than what we throw away.
I don't do much more than organise other people's ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.
Masochism is a valuable job skill.
I think in a way, you're doomed, once you can envision something. You're sort of doomed to make it happen. I've found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that's usually the moment that the relationship starts to fall apart.
You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.
The best fights don't occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.
Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished.
I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.
The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.
Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.
A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.
If nothing else, there's comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.
If you flee from the things you fear, there's no resolution.
Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them.
People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
I just don't want to die without a few scars.
We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
I really love idiot, enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances; they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.
Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.
The first step to eternal life is you have to die.
I live by fallacy. 'If I get enough nice Ikea furniture, I'll be a grown-up.' Then I catch myself. Or, 'If I get off by myself, away from the stress of modern life, I'll be OK.' Then I catch myself.
You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.
Of the big horror movies of the '70s, you have 'The Omen,' 'The Sentinel,' 'Rosemary's Baby,' 'The Stepford Wives,' 'Burnt Offerings' - these are all romantic fatalist movies where there's a sort of glimmer of hope... but darkness wins.
With a book, you're guaranteed the audience has a certain skill level and that the audience has to make an ongoing effort to consume this product and that the project is being consumed by just one person at a time. I really want to play to that strength because it's one of the few advantages books still have.
There's a television show, 'Hoarders,' where people have those homes filled with stuff. Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.
If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.
Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
Jack Palance was my distant uncle - that's the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become such a famous 'heavy' in films. I prayed for good scars of my own. Not just acne scars.
My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.
Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?
Horror stories give us a way of exhausting our emotions around social issues, like a woman's right to an abortion, which I always thought was the core of 'Rosemary's Baby,' or the backlash against feminism which I always thought was the core to 'Stepford Wives.'
Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
Think about George Orwell's three-minute hate from the novel '1984' and how that left everyone sort of exhausted and able to live their boring humdrum lives. If our lives are going to continue being unfulfilled and boring, perhaps we do need some sort of short-term violent chaos incorporated into them, to make them more palatable.
Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.
My books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation - often elevated loneliness - to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not alone; they are with people.
We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can.
When I first started writing, it was me alone with a computer in my apartment. I hated the time away from other people, and my writing sucked. Now I have a laptop; I can do the most tedious part of my job in a public place.
More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.
We're so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior.
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