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

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

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

"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."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"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 (Fight Club: A Novel)

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its 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. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"...the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"This is your life and its ending one moment at a time."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. 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."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"I don't want to die without any scars."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"Reality means you live until you die...the real truth is nobody wants reality."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)

"A journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. I am Jack's Broken Heart."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"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?"
— Chuck Palahniuk

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

"What we don't understand we can make mean anything."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"...hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories)

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

"For sure, they don't teach you this in history class, but in colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing less than fair game for everybody to nail. Men or women, anybody bent over had no way of knowing who was doing the ram job, and this was the real reason you never wanted to end up here unless you had a family member or a friend who'd stand with you the whole time. To protect you. To watch your ass, for real."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Some stories, you use up. Others use you up."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"Give me lust, baby.

Flash.
Give me malice.
Flash.
Give me detached existentialist ennui.
Flash.
Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"...the idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Fuck me. I'm so tired of being me. Me beautiful. Me ugly. Blonde. Brunette. A million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me.
Who I was before the accident is just a story now. Everything before now, before now, before now, is just a story I carry around. I guess that would apply to anybody in the world. What I need is a new story about who I am.
What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I wanted to give up the idea that I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone."
— 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 (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"I am an invisible monster, and I am incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"I say let me never be complete, I say may I never be content,I say deliver me from Swedish furniture, I say deliver me from clever arts, I say deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth,I say you have to give up! I say evolve, and let the chips fall where they may!"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"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."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
Well, sweetheart, I tell her, yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)