“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”
— Chuck Palahniuk
“We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”
“I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”
“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.”
“No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”
“You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”
“Art never comes from happiness.”
“This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”
“If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t.”
“Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.”
“This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.”
“Your past is just a story. And once you realize this it has no power over you.”
“If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?”
“There’s nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics.”
“Life is short, death is forever.”
“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.”
“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”
“You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.”
“Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.”
“How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”
“The first rule of fight club is, you don’t talk about fight club.”
“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.”
“Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.”
“May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.”
“People don’t listen, they just wait for their turn to talk.”
“Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly – all these make for great stories.”
“What would Tyler Durden do?”
“The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly.”
“I don’t want to die without any scars.”
“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.”
“Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.”
“We’ll never be as young as we are tonight.”
“Find out what you’re afraid of and go live there.”
“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.”
“On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
“If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.”
“Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains.”
“What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher.”
“Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.”
“Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.”
“You’re always haunted by the idea you’re wasting your life.”
“How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you’re proud of will end up as trash.”
“Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell.”
“I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. I am Jack’s Broken Heart.”
“Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.”
“If you love something set it free, but don’t be surprised if it comes back with herpes.”
“Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It’s because they know what it’s like to be treated like an animal.”
“Sorry, mom. Sorry, God.”
“Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?”
“Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do?”
“With insomnia, you’re never really awake; but you’re never really asleep.”
“What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.”
“Love and life belongs to great risk.”
“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.”
“I’m working harder than I have ever worked in my entire life, but what the hell, my life is my job now, and my job is my life and that’s the way it should be.”
“Everyone’s in their own personal coma.”
“I’m a toxic waste byproduct of God’s creation.”
“That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can’t control life, at least you can control your version.”
“You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel strong. You save people by letting them save you.”
“We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...”
“I am Jack’s smirking revenge.”
“Sex pretty much cures everything.”
“If You Don’t Claim Your Humanity, You Will Become A Statistic.”
“There’s no escaping fate, it just keeps going. Day and night, the future just keeps coming at you.”
“What you have to consider is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that could happen.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Just for the record, the weather today is increasing turmoil with a possible physical and emotional breakdown.”
“You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.”
“You’ll need to suffer to make any real art.”
“When you reach the end of your life – trust me, you won’t look back and savor the moments you spent alone.”
“College is like a fountain of knowledge – and the students are there to drink.”
“I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I ran some more.”
“The most boring thing in the entire world is nudity. The second most boring thing is honesty.”
“Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.”
“Marla’s philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn’t.”
“The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.”
“No, it’s not fair, but what makes Earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. It won’t help the situation for you to get all upset.”
“People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.”
“No, none of us seem so very real. We’re only supporting characters in the lives of each other. Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.”
“There are only patterns. Patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns, patterns hidden by patterns, patterns within patterns.”
“The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.”
“There’s no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can’t re-create what’s over.”
“The best fights don’t occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.”
“What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.”
“It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.”
“I’m living the life I love, I tell myself, and loving the life I live. I tell myself: I deserved this. This is exactly what I wanted.”
“If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.”
“It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.”
“Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct.”
“It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.”
“I am an invisible monster, and I am incapable of loving anybody. You don’t know which is worse.”
“You always kill the one you love.”
“You are permanent, but this life is not.”
“Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.”
“The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God. As if everything’s fine.”
“No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.”
“A male chauvinist pig isn’t born, he’s made, and more and more of them are being made by women.”
“You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth.”
“The more things you own, the more they own you.”
We're on a mission of turning inspiring quotes into beautiful wallpapers. Start your week with a motivational kick. Don't miss out on our next weekly batch.
Join 48,000+ other people and subscribe to Quotefancy Weekly Digest.
