"As young people we want something to slow us down and keep us trapped in one place long enough to look below the surface of the world. That disaster is a car crash or a war. To make us sit still. It can be getting cancer or getting pregnant. The important part is how it seems to catch us by surprise. That disaster stops us from living the life we'd planned as children - a life of constant dashing around."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"All you can do is hope for a pattern to emerge, and sometimes it never does. Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)

"The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing and so she won't commit to anything."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"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)

"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)

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

"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)

"You grow up to become living proof of your parents' limitations. Their less-than masterpiece."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"It's not love or anything, but I think I like you, too."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"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)

"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 (Survivor)

"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)

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

"It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"Everyone's in their own personal coma."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"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)

"Because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"No, whether a woman is a concubine to fuck or a damsel to redeem, she's always just some passive object to fulfill a man's purpose."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Snuff)

"Anymore, no one's mind is their own."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)

"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)

"The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.'

Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"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

"there is nothing special in the world. nothing magic. just physics."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

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

"you can only hold a smile for so long. after that it's just teeth."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"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)

"...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. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"“How can you possibly believe he really loves you?” Miss Sneezy looks from the Mother to the Saint to Mr. Whittier’s hand.“You have no choice,” Mr. Whittier tells her. “If you need to be loved.”"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"The murderer the victim the witness each of us thinks our role is the lead."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Nothing of me is original. I'm the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.

"
— Chuck Palahniuk

"...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)

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

"If we can forgive what has been done to us . . .

If we can forgive what we've done to others . . .

If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being
villians or victims.

Only then can we maybe rescue the world.

But we still sit here, waiting to be saved. While we're
still victims, hoping to be discovered while we suffer."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted)

"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

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

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

"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)

"Rant would tell people: 'You're a different human being to everybody you meet.'"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"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

"I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.'
A spinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"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)

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"hope is a good thing. maybe the best of good things. and no good thing ever dies"
— the shawshank redemption

"Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting."
— Paul Monette

"I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife
inside
because there was no alternative except to hide as long
as possible---
not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance:
trying to connect."
— Charles Bukowski

"Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had ben taken from me, stripped off like clothes I'd only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious."
— Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude)