"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 pieces... 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 it up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just to controlling."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.
In a way, being an addict is very proactive."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"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)

"One minute was enough, Tyler said, "A person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce a risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book. . . . A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a "mass medium." No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"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 (Asfixia / Choke)

"I’m breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions, because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"The problem in this case was you can't be a middle-aged virgin in American without something being wrong with you. People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weaker."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"You can guess this is how men have been handling Eva's hostility for her whole life. Just distract her. Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away. That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"It's because we're so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and legs everybody has. We're so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we're trained to want."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.

Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight.

The camera obscura.

Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead.
You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)

"It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Here, I'm supposed to tell her the truth. I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.
In a way, being an addict is very proactive.

A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death. There is such a thing as planning your getaway."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.
This only looks like love."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love.

Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.
At least the ancient Greeks were being honest. p20."
— 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

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

"It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"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 addressed and recorded. nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. on a roller coaster. at a movie. still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. you know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids. the test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. and because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. real elation. real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.

the laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. 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: A Novel)

"At That Moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay.
It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved. "
— Chuck Palahniuk

"You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is, you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this"
— 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

"Each holiday tradition acts as an exercise in cognitive development, a greater challenge for the child. Despite the fact most parents don't recognize this function, they still practice the exercise.

Rant also saw how resolving the illusions is crucial to how the child uses any new skills.

A child who is never coached with Santa Claus may never develop an ability to imagine. To him, nothing exists except the literal and tangible.

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.

But a child who relinquishes the illusions of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, that child may come away with the most important skill set. That child may recognize the strength of his own imagination and faith. He will embrace the ability to create his own reality. That child becomes his own authority. He determines the nature of his world. His own vision. And by doing so, by the power of his example, he determines the reality of the other two types: those who can't imagine, and those who can't trust. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"i'm not sure what we're running from. nobody. or the future. fate. growing up. getting old. picking up the pieces. as if running we won't have to get on with our lives."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

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

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

"you're doomed at being you."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"everyone is in their own personal coma."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"it's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. we have no scar to show from happiness. we learn so little from peace."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.
"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"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."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)