Top 1089 Quotes & Sayings by Chuck Palahniuk - Page 16

There's still a thousand places I haven't gone to die.

Or maybe...just maybe this whole process is our training wheels towards something bigger. If we can reflect and know our lives, we might stay awake and shape our futures.

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.

A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe in anything- tangible or intangible- again. To never trust or wonder.

There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.

With my eyes closed, I ask if she knows how this will all turn out. "Long-term or short-term?" she asks. Both. "Long-term," she says, "we're all going to die. Then our bodies will rot. No surprise there. Short-term, we're going to live happily ever after." Really? "Really," she says. "So don't sweat it.

It's nice to see something more pathetic than I feel right now.

No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way.

Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you’re alive - or praising you after you ain’t.

I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything.

There are bodies buried everywhere you just have to know where to look.

According to Plato, we don't learn anything. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything. Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know.

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and adressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. [...] The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

Find value in what we've been taught is worthless.

The girls you meet are never very far from their worst-case scenario.

Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.

Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: if someone yells “stop!”, goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: the fights are bare knuckle. No shirt, no shoes, no weapons. Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight.

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

You know that old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.

Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity, you will become a statistic.

It’s a fun playtime. Please, don’t kill it with big words.

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

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. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window. You had their full attention. People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. And when they spoke, they weren't just telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.

The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point.

People die', she says. 'People tear down houses. But furniture, fine, beautiful furniture, it just goes on and on, surviving everything.' She says, 'Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture.

Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit.

Unless we have that moment of chaos, followed by the emotional release of realization, nothing will be remembered.

The air will always be to filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.

You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception.

At the last minute, I couldn't wear the Hitler mustache because Tiger Stripe ate it; and then I didn't want to take my kitty and risk his coughing up some big Nazi hairball on someone's front stoop.

Griping isn't the same as creating something. Rebelling isn't rebuilding. Ridiculing isn't replacing. We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

Some people are just born human, the rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there.

Where every day doesn't start with an alarm clock and end with the television.

Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.

If you're going to read this, don't bother.

The bad news is we don't have any control. The good news is we can't make any mistakes.

Seek midday nourishment. Visit memorial acclaimed war hero Colonel Sanders.

Maybe this is why Misty loved him. Loved you. Because you believed in her so much more than she did. You expected more from her than she did from herself.

And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.

Some little part of themselves for someone in the future to discover. Maybe a thought. We were here. We built this. A reminder.

Today is just one of those days the sun comes out to really humiliate you.

A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.

How I feel is cheap and used, dirty and humiliated. Dirty and tricked and thrown away.

Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.

I am the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.

It's okay to cry as long as you're faking it.

You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm.

If you're not drunk and half naked by this point, you're not paying attention.

In the end, it's never what you worry about that gets you.

It’s weird to think the place where we’re standing will only be a point in the sky.

The bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life. Our real discoveries come from chaos. - Brandy Alexander

Listen up. Rant would tell people: ‘You’re a different human being to everybody you meet.’ Sometimes Rant said, ‘You only ever is in the eyes of other folks.’ If you were going to carve a quote on his grave, his favorite saying was: ‘The future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday.

I've been choking to death for years. By now this should be easy.

At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor.

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

The same as real life, there is no happily ever after.

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.

She drank a glass of wine and looked for something new to ruin with her lack of talent.

Fertility says, "Can you relax and just let things happen?" I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen? "And Joy," she says, "and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment." She says all the wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "You don't have to control everything," she says. "You can't control everything." But you can be ready for disaster. A sign goes by saying, Buckle Up. "If you worry about disaster all of the time, that's what you are going to get," Fertility says.

I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smoky eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's a kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive "let them eat cake" type of chauvinism.