Patternsoflife > Patternsoflife's Quotes

“By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior. Each of those three traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped-up tests to build a child's faith and imagination. The first test is to believe in a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust in a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: To believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money.

From a man to an animal to a fairy.

From toys to candy to money. Thus, interestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairy-dom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickels... dimes... and quarters.

In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as he or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency. ”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Tell the world what scares you the most” says Brandy.
She gives us each an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil and says “Save the world with some advice from the future”
Seth writes on the back of a card and hands the card to Brandy for her to read.
On game shows, Brandy reads, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer dryer pair.”
Brandy puts a big Plumbago kiss in the little square for the stamp and lets the wind lift and card and sail it off toward the towers of downtown Seattle.
Seth hands her another, and Brandy reads:
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random useless facts that are all we have left from our education”
A kiss and the card’s on it’s way toward Lake Washington.
From Seth:
When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”
A kiss and it’s off on the wind toward Ballard.
Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”
Interstate 5 snakes by in the distance. From high atop the Space Needle, the southbound lanes are red chase lights, and the northbound lanes are white chase lights. I take a card and write:
I love Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I overcompensate by worshipping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again.
Beandy is waiting to rake the card and read it out loud. Brandy’s waiting to read my worst fears to the world, but I don’t give her the card. I kiss it myself with the lips I don’t have and let the wind take it out of my hand. The card flies up, up, up to the stars and then falls down to land in the suicide net.
While I watch my future trapped in the suicide net Brandy reads another card from Seth.
We are all self-composting”
I write another card from the future and Brandy reads it:
When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves”
An updraft lifts up my worst fears from the suicide net and lifts them away.
Seth writes and Brandy reads.
You have to keep recycling yourself”.
I write and Brandy reads.
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.”
I write and Brandy reads.
The one you love and the one who loves you are never ever the same person.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“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, Choke

“I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Some stories, she’d say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be. ”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Griping isn't the same as creating something. Rebelling isn't rebuilding. Ridiculing isn't replacing. We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“You can say anything if enough people will listen.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Death is a long process," Archer says. "Your body is just the first part of you that croaks." Meaning: Beyond that, your dreams have to die. Then your expectations. And your anger about investing a lifetime in learning shit and loving people and earning money, only to have all that crap come to basically nothing. Really, your physical body dying is the easy part. Beyond that, your memories must die. And your ego. Your pride and shame and ambition and hope, all that Personal Identity Crap can take centuries to expire.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Damned

“No matter what else you came up against, if you could smile and laugh while a monkey did you with chestnuts in a dank concrete basement while somebody took pictures, well, any other situation would be a piece of cake”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“We live and we die and anything else is just a delusion.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies.

The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“How miserably hypocritical, you might say, but no sooner am I offered a chance to flee Hell than I yearn to stay. Few families hold their relations as closely as do prisons. Few marriages sustain the high level of passion that exists between criminals and those who seek to bring them to justice. It’s no wonder the Zodiac Killer flirted so relentlessly with the police. Or that Jack the Ripper courted and baited detectives with his - or her - coy letters. We all wish to be pursued. We all long to be desired.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Damned

“This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“This is our world now, and those ancient people are dead.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention. If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window. You had their full attention. People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. And when they spoke, they weren't just telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything"... "Nothing was ever good enough," my mom says, "so here at the end of my life, I'm left with nothing.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“That big glorious mountain. For one transitory moment, I think I may have actually seen it”. For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations. She’d seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She’d seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains.
What she’d seen in that flash wasn’t even a “mountain”. It wasn’t a natural resource. It had no name.
“That’s the big goal”, she said. “To find a cure for knowledge”.
For education. For living in our heads.
Ever since the story of Adam and Eve in the bible, humanity had been a little too smart for its own good, the Mommy said. Ever since eating that apple. Her goal was to find, if not a cure, then at least a treatment that would give people back their innocence.
“The cerebral cortex, the cerebellum”, she said, “that’s where your problem is”.
If she could just get down to using only her brain stem, she’d be cured.
This would be somewhere beyond happiness and sadness.
You don’t see fish agonized by wild mood swings.
Sponges never have a bad day.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“You can't be beautiful," Brandy says about a thousand times, "until you feel beautiful.”
― chuck palahniuk

“I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things.
Only end them.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“This wasn't any mere song and dance; here was a bold, blaring declaration howling itself into the empty face of death.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Tell-All

“this is the upside of already being eternally damned”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.
What it's going to be, I don't know.
Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
And maybe knowing isn't the point.
Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“You become smart when you don't need to quote someone anymore."
I am still stupid: I quoted Chuck Palahiniuk”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“My parents meant well, but the road to Hell is paved with publicity stunts.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Damned