"She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste."
— Julio Cortázar (Hopscotch)

"...[A]nything worth dying for ... is certainly worth living for."
— Joseph Heller (Catch-22)

"You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened."
— Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

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

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

"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)

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

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

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

"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)

"The things you own end up owning you."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"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)

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

"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

"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)

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

"...the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."
— 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)

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

"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)

"The only difference between martyrdom and suicide is press coverage."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor: 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

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

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

"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)

"Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?" Why did I cause so much pain? Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, "No, that's not right." Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"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)

"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)

"We'll never be as young as we are tonight."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against."
— Chuck Palahniuk

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

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

"You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"You buy furniture. 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. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"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)

"The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend."
— 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)

"...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)

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

"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)

"Your heart is my piñata."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"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)

"Ok. You fuck me, then snub me. You love me, you hate me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is this a pretty accurate description of our relationship."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

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

"What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized yet."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)