Quotes & Sayings About Life Chuck Palahniuk

The wild daisies and Indian paintbrush whizzing past are just the genitals of a different life form — Chuck Palahniuk

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God's most selfish children would steal God's greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.
This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.
Only God has the right to surprise His children with death. — Chuck Palahniuk

Without just one nest
A bird can call the world home
Life is your career — Chuck Palahniuk

Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you. — Chuck Palahniuk

Your whole life, she says, you're searching for disaster - you're auditioning disasters - so you'll be well rehearsed when the ultimate disaster finally arrives. — Chuck Palahniuk

You see, life only turns out good or bad for only a little bit. And then it turns out some other way. — Chuck Palahniuk

All I want is somebody to ask me what happened. Then, I'll get on with my life. — Chuck Palahniuk

If you died right now, how would you feel about your life? — Chuck Palahniuk

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. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

Where even if someone loves you enough to save your life, they still castrate you. — Chuck Palahniuk

Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value.Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melo-dramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away. — Chuck Palahniuk

What's up with you? How come you're being like this?' Because it's the truth. This is the world we live in. — Chuck Palahniuk

You had a near-life experience, the mechanic says. — Chuck Palahniuk

What I do know is I've got a brain filled with jokes I can't forget - like a tumor the size of a grapefruit inside of my skull. And I know that eventually even dog shit turns white and stops stinking, but I have this permanent head filled with crap I've been trained my whole life to think is funny. — Chuck Palahniuk

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. — Chuck Palahniuk

Your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you. Then puberty makes you Satan, just because you want something better. — Chuck Palahniuk

It took my whole life to buy this stuff. — Chuck Palahniuk

This deluded little rube who really thought the future would be any better. If you just worked hard enough. If you just learned enough. Ran fast enough. Everything would turn out right, and your life would amount to something. — Chuck Palahniuk

What she's learned is what she always learns. Plato was right. We're all of us immortal. We couldn't die if we wanted to. Every day of her life, every minute of her life, if she could just remember that. — Chuck Palahniuk

This is how I found the strength not to get on with my former life. This is how I found the courage not to pick up the same old pieces. — Chuck Palahniuk

Rip yourself open.
Tell me my life story before I die.
Sew yourself shut. — Chuck Palahniuk

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. — Chuck Palahniuk

Besides.
Eternity was going to seem like forever.
With the crowds of smiling people smiling at me in the dark, me who spent my life cleaning bathrooms and mowing the lawn, I told myself, why rush anything?
I'd backslid before, I'd backslide again. Practice makes perfect.
If you could call it that.
I figured, a few more sins would help round out my resume.
This is the upside of already being eternally damned.
I figured, Hell could wait. — Chuck Palahniuk

No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life. — Chuck Palahniuk

So often with beginning writers, the story that they want to start with is the most important story of their life - my molestation, my this, my horrible drug addiction - they want to tell that most important story, and they don't have the skills to tell it yet, so it ends up becoming a comedy. A powerful story told poorly becomes funny, it just makes people laugh behind their hands. — Chuck Palahniuk

I am helpless.
I am stupid, and all I do is want and need things.
My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it "Entourage."
This is how bad your life can get. — Chuck Palahniuk

In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways. — Chuck Palahniuk

Give me a complete late-stage revision of my adult life.
Flash.
Give me anything in this whole fucking world that is exactly what it looks like!
Flash. — Chuck Palahniuk

You realize that there's no point in doing anything if nobody's watching. — Chuck Palahniuk

What you end up doing," the mechanic says, "is you spend your life searching for a father and God. — Chuck Palahniuk

Do you respect someone's right to challenge and discover their true potential?How is a gang-bang any different than risking your life to climb mount Everest? — Chuck Palahniuk

Even a killer needs to talk, to tell his life story, so bad he'll come and sit beside a grave or a rotting body and just blab, blab, blab at it for hours. Until he makes sense. Until the killer can convince himself with the story of his new reality. The reality that--he was right. — Chuck Palahniuk

If you won't share my life with me, maybe you'll share my death. — Chuck Palahniuk

Life in These United States. Laughter Is the Best Medicine. — Chuck Palahniuk

Someday, I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

When you're thinking about the rest of your life, you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road. — Chuck Palahniuk

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. — Chuck Palahniuk

Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground. — Chuck Palahniuk

A certain number of people have to live their lives outdoors between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., and a A certain number of people can only leave their homes between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. So basically, public life has to be lived in these shifts, in order for everyone to fit on the streets because there's just no more room for any more infrastructure, any more highways. So it polarizes the community into day people and night people, and it becomes sort of a metaphor for racism and classism. — Chuck Palahniuk

With the novels, I usually start from something in my own life that I can't resolve, so I turn it into a metaphor and for months or sometimes years I'll exhaust all of my emotional reaction to this issue by making it enormous on the page. — Chuck Palahniuk

Remember this," Tyler said. "The people you're trying to step on, we're everyone you depend on. We're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you're asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life. "We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact," Tyler said. "So don't fuck with us. — Chuck Palahniuk

I think that I am responsible for the death of thousands of things and for the misery of thousands of people, just through the things that I buy and how I live my life, and these are not things that ever deserved to die. — Chuck Palahniuk

If you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. — Chuck Palahniuk

She reflected on her time in Paris and thought how it seemed as if she'd spent half her life drinking wine in bed and covered with contusions. This, it occurred to her, was how it must feel to be Melanie Griffith. — Chuck Palahniuk

At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves. — Chuck Palahniuk

What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to bw wrong? — Chuck Palahniuk

Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you think every thing you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. 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. You have been warned. — Chuck Palahniuk

My writing has to excite people and depict or include their experiences. That's part of my process - to go out and interact with people. It's very much like an archival process. I understand that the Brothers Grimm would go out and get people talking so they could document folk tales that weren't being documented any other way. I try to offer a little bit of myself - some experience from my life that evokes stories in other people. — Chuck Palahniuk

When you get famous, dinner isn't food anymore; it's twenty ounces of protein, ten ounces of carbohydrates, salt-free, fat-free, sugar-free fuel. This is a meal every two hours, six times a day. Eating isn't about eating anymore. It's about protein assimilation.
It's about cellular rejuvenation cream. Washing is about exfoliation. What used to be breathing is respiration.
I'd be the first to congratulate anybody if they could do a better job of faking flawless beauty and delivering vague inspiring messages:
Calm down. Everyone, breathe deep. Life is good. Be just and kind. Be the love. — Chuck Palahniuk

And when they're old enough I'm going to tell my little girls that everybody looks a little crazy if you're looking close enough, and if, you can't look that close then you don't really love them. All the while life goes around. And if you keep waiting for somebody perfect you'll never find love, because it's how much you love them is what makes them perfect. — Chuck Palahniuk

As human beings, our first commandment is:
Something needs to happen — Chuck Palahniuk

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 up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be. — Chuck Palahniuk

Brandy says, "Don't you see? Because we're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes." Brandy says, "I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life. — Chuck Palahniuk

There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just warming up. — Chuck Palahniuk

I'm living the life I love, I tell myself, and loving the life I live. I tell myself: I deserved this. This is exactly what I wanted. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

Sobriety is okay enough," Denny says, "but someday, I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know? — Chuck Palahniuk

Imagine how you'd feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn't stand. — Chuck Palahniuk

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. — Chuck Palahniuk

I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful. — Chuck Palahniuk

I'm giving you my life to prove to myself I can, I really can love somebody. Even when I'm not getting paid, I can give love and happiness and charm. You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody. — Chuck Palahniuk

As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life. — Chuck Palahniuk

I just couldn't go there yet. Settle for less. I didn't want to process through anything. I didn't want to pick up any pieces. Lower my expectations. Get on with my less-than life. I didn't want to feel better about being still alive. Start compensating. — Chuck Palahniuk

The story is even Bill Wilson, a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, couldn't overcome the sex monkey on his back, and spent his sober life cheating on his wife and filled with guilt. — Chuck Palahniuk

The dreaming world, they'd think we were crazy. Those people still in bed, they'd be asleep another hour, then washing their faces, under their arms, and between their legs, before going to the same work they did every day. Living that same life, every day. — Chuck Palahniuk

I'm really glad that I made a lot of mistakes, poorly chose my friends throughout my twenties, and didn't have a rocket trajectory that set me on one path without making any mistakes or having any setbacks. The older I get, the more I realize that it's all of these failed, horrible things from my past, and the stories that they generated, that are the things I will draw on for the rest of my life. — Chuck Palahniuk

It's just such a big commitment," Brandy says, "being a girl, you know. Forever."
Taking the hormones. For the rest of her life. The pills, the patches, the injections, for the rest of her life. And what if there was
someone, just one person who would love her, who could make her life happy, just the way she was, without the hormones and make-up and the clothes and shoes and surgery? She has to at least look around the world a little. — Chuck Palahniuk

My life has been about living like a monk and looking like a priest so that people will come up to me and tell me their most appalling stories. They have to make their confession to somebody, and it might as well be me. — Chuck Palahniuk

This isn't so much romance as it is opportunity [victor mancini] — Chuck Palahniuk

What stops you here is what stops your entire life.
The air will always be too 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. — Chuck Palahniuk

More and more, for the stupid little kid, that was the idea . . .
That if enough people looked at you, you'd never need anybody's attention ever again.
That if someday you were caught, exposed, and revealed enough, then you'd never be able to hide again. There'd be no difference between your public and your private lives.
That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you'd never want to own or do another thing.
That if you could eat or sleep enough, you'd never need more.
That if enough people loved you, you'd stop needing love.
That you could ever be smart enough.
That you could someday get enough sex.
These all became the little boy's new goals. The illusions he'd have for the rest of his life. These were all the promises he saw in the fat man's smile — Chuck Palahniuk

Prepare to evacuate soul in ten, in nine, eight.
Chloe's splashing through the ankle-deep back-up of renal fluid from her failed kidneys.
Death will commence in five.
Five, four.
Around her, a parasitic life spray paints her heart.
Four, three.
Three, two.
Chloe climbs hand-over-hand up the curled lining of her own throat.
Death to commence in three, two.
Moonlight shines in through the open mout ...
h.
Prepare for the last breath, now.
Evacuate.
Now.
Soul clear of body.
Death commences.
Now. — Chuck Palahniuk

My private history in terms of people in my life who are dead is very easy to discuss. I don't feel those people can be threatened or intruded upon now. But I am enormously protective of the people who are currently in my life, my existing friends and family. That is where the curtain is drawn. — Chuck Palahniuk

After a good-looking boy gives you rabies two, three times, you'll settle down and marry somebody less exciting for the rest of your life — Chuck Palahniuk

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

The whole island was exactly what a kid growing up in some trailer park
say some dump like Tecumseh Lake, Georgia
would dream about. This kid would turn out all the lights in the trailer while her mom was at work. She'd lie down flat on her back, on the matted-down orange shag carpet in the living room. The carpet smelling like somebody stepped in a dog pile. The orange melted black in spots from cigarette burns. The ceiling was water-stained. she'd fold her arms across her chest, and she could picture life in this kind of place. It would be that time
late at night
when your ears reach out for any sound. When you can see more with your eyes closed than open. The fish skeleton. From the first time she held a crayon, that's what she'd draw. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

Something foreign is always living itself through you. Your whole life is the vehicle for something to come to earth An evil spirit. A theory. A
marketing campaign. A political strategy. A religious doctrine. — Chuck Palahniuk

I melt and swell at the moment of landing when one wheel thuds on the runway but the plane leans to one side and hangs in the decision to right itself or roll. For this moment, nothing matters. Look up into the stars and you're gone. Not your luggage. Nothing matters. Not your bad breath. The windows are dark outside and the turbine engines roar backward. The cabin hangs at the wrong angle under the roar of the turbines, and you will never have to file another expense account claim. Receipt required for items over twenty-five dollars. You will never have to get another haircut.
A thud, and the second wheel hits the tarmac. The staccato of a hundred seat-belt buckles snapping open, and the single-use friend you almost died sitting next to says:
I hope you make your connection.
Yeah, me too.
And this is how long your moment lasted. And life goes on. — Chuck Palahniuk

I'm always identifying some fallacy in my own life. I'm sort of making fun of myself by exploring and unpacking just why I'm sort of automatically thrown to be a certain way. — Chuck Palahniuk

You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real. — Chuck Palahniuk

It's worth noting up front that I have always conceived of my mind as a digestive organ. A stomach for processing knowledge, if you will. As a looping, wrinkled mass, a human brain unmistakably looks like gray intestines, and it's within these thinking bowels that my experiences are broken down, consumed to become my life story. My thoughts occur as flavorful burps or acrid barf. The indigestible gristle and bone of my memories are expelled as these words. — Chuck Palahniuk

There is a social contract in "Fight Club" and in "Choke" where the protagonist has deceived a whole bunch of people. In "Choke" it's all of these people who think that they've saved his life, and really care about him because they've embraced him and they've been his saviors. In "Fight Club" it's all of these people who are dying of various diseases, and they thought that Edward Norton was also dying so they allowed him really strong pent-up emotions. — Chuck Palahniuk

I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television. — Chuck Palahniuk

You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. — Chuck Palahniuk

Something or someone lived or died so you could have this life.
The mountain of the dead. They left you into the daylight. — Chuck Palahniuk

Even if you tell yourself "Today I'm going to drink coffee the wrong way ... from a dirty boot." Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot.
Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right. Even when you say, "I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong ... " you're right. You're right about being wrong. You're right even when you're an idiot.
No matter how stupid your idea, you're doomed to be right because it's yours. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I'm sick and tired of it.
How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages.
...
The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and the tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished. — Chuck Palahniuk

This is better than real life. — Chuck Palahniuk

Choosing sides, the captain of the Red Team says, "We'll give you our best -pitcher. ... "
And we'll take the kid who picks his nose and eats it. And we'll take the kid who smells like piss. We'll take the leper and the left-handed Satanist and the HIV-infected hemophiliac and the hermaphrodite and the pedophile. We'll take drug addiction and we'll take JPEGs of the world instead of the world, MP3s instead of music, and we'll trade real life for sitting at a keyboard. We'll spot you happiness and we'll spot you humanity, and we'll sacrifice mercy just so long as you keep Cannibal at bay. — Chuck Palahniuk

Jump to how life was when you were a baby and you could only eat baby food. You'd stagger over to the coffee table. You're up on your feet and you have to keep waddling along on those Vienna sausage legs or fall down. Then you get to the coffee table and bounce your big soft baby head on the sharp corner. You're down, and man, oh, man, it hurts. Still it isn't anything tragic until Mom and Dad run over. Oh, you poor, brave thing. Only then do you cry. — Chuck Palahniuk

Just let yourself be broken and humiliated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry ... — Chuck Palahniuk

Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. — Chuck Palahniuk

Committing suicide just seemed to be another aggressive plan to fix her life. — Chuck Palahniuk

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 — Chuck Palahniuk