Top 1089 Quotes & Sayings by Chuck Palahniuk - Page 14

You had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

A male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.

I'm not so much a good friend as I'm the savior who wants you to worship him forever.

Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb.

We’d turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we’d survive to talk about.

What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.

You’re training a new employee,' says Mrs. Clark, 'to take over your boring old job.' When you raise a child.

That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.

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

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.

My point is, that if I'm honest, my life is all about me.

That’s how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It re-creates some forgotten terror. Something we’d like to think we’ve grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It’s something you’d hoped was healed.

Potassium cyanide," says the talent wrangler as she leans over to pick up a paper napkin off the floor. "Found naturally in the cassava or manioc roots native to Africa, used to tint architectural blueprints in the form of the deep-blue pigment known as Prussian blue. Hence the shade 'cyan' blue.

On the other side of the handrail, the hallway's gray marble floor looks as if we've climbed a stairway through the clouds.

Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?

Tell the world what scares you most. Save the world with some advice from the future.

Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.

Besides, hysteria is only possible with an audience.

Our real discoveries come from chaos.

A guy's calling to say he's failing algebra II. Just as a point of practice, I say, Kill yourself. A woman calls and says her kids won't behave. Without missing a beat, I tell her, Kill yourself. A man calls to say his car won't start. Kill yourself. A woman calls to ask what time the late movie starts. Kill yourself. She asks, "Isn't this 555-1327? Is this the Moorehouse CinePlex? I say, Kill yourself. Kill yourself. Kill yourself.

Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone.

In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring shape-outlines we have to blink against.

Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.

The little boy smiled back at all the angry faces glaring in at him. And the little boy blew kisses.

I'm sorry if this all seems a little rushed and desperate. It is.

you're a product just as much. a product of a product. the people who design cars, they're products, your teachers, products. the minister in your church, another product.

On game shows, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer and dryer pair.

These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics.

You can kill a lifetime without feeling anything but skin.

There is nothing special in the world. nothing magic. just physics.

Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide.

The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate.

An important part of building a new culture was allowing people to complain about their past. At first, the more they complained, the worse the past would seem. But by venting, people could start to resolve the past. By bitching and bitching and bitching, they could exhaust the drama of their own horror stories. Grow bored. Only then could they accept a new story for their lives. Move forward.

They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful. Because now she looks so—bad.

Alternating the thoughtful task of writing with the mindless work of laundry or dish washing will give you the breaks you need for new ideas and insights to occur. If you don't know what comes next in the story... clean your toilet. Change the bed sheets. For Christ sakes, dust the computer. A better idea will come.

The only person we'll hate more than each other is ourselves.

Any time some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you're a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink.

Mylife might be little and boring, but at least it’s mine - not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.

This is passive-aggression in action.

Sex pretty much cures everything.

To hell with housework, our top priority has always been between our legs.

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.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?

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

I am Jack's smirking revenge.

In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.

and i can't stand the idea of being alone. i can't bear the thought of being free.

Look up at the stars and you're gone.

the world is the cradle and your trap.

This is the greatest momemt of your life and your out missing it

Cassie Wright knows, the moment you make yourself available to any man, he starts to take you for granted

With every lecture, you’re forced to look again at every choice you’ve made over the lesson-by-lesson chain of your entire life. And after all these years, you see how little you have to work with, how limited your life and education have been. How scant was your courage and curiosity. Not to mention your expectations.

Daytime television, you can tell who’s watching by the three kinds of commercials. Either it’s clinics for drying out drunks. Or it’s law firms who want to settle injury suits. Or it’s schools offering mail-order vocational degrees to make you a bookkeeper. A private detective. Or a locksmith. If you’re watching daytime television, this is your new demographic. You’re a drunk. Or a cripple. Or an idiot.

I am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed, sense of rejection.

For six months I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.

you're doomed at being you.

Every generation wants to be the last.

Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That’s the earth. Why it goes around. We’re the rocks. And what happens to us—the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse—why, that’s just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.

Even if I overcompensate, nobody will ever want me. Not Seth. Not my folks. You can’t kiss someone who has no lips. Oh, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I’ll be anybody you want me to be