Top 500 Chuck Palahniuk Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “The evil queen was stupid to play Snow White’s game. There’s an age where a woman has to move on to another kind of power. Money, for example. Or a gun.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

303. “The weather today is partly angry, leading to resignation and ultimatums.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

304. “There are a lot of things we don’t want to know about the people we love.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

305. “Recycling and speed limits are bullshit. They’re like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

306. “I am nothing, and not even that.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

307. “It’s not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

308. “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

309. “The liberator who destroys my property is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

310. “After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

311. “I am the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

312. “To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

313. “You ever wonder when god’s coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?”

— Chuck Palahniuk

314. “People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

315. “If you start in the pit of despair with these profane, awful things, even a glimmer of hope or awareness is going to occur that’s much brighter coming from this dark, awful beginning.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

316. “A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

317. “When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

318. “Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo’s David is just a million hits with a hammer. We’re all of us a million bits put together the right way.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

319. “Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

320. “Just let yourself be broken and humiliated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry...”

— Chuck Palahniuk

321. “Mylife might be little and boring, but at least it’s mine – not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

322. “You take a 98-percent concentration of fuming nitric acid and add the acid to three times that amount of sulfuric acid. Do this in an ice bath. Then add glycerin drop-by-drop with an eye dropper. You have nitroglycerin.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

323. “Some writers research in order to write. I write in order to research topics that interest me. Especially if I can meet with other people, in forums from illness support groups to phone-sex hotlines, and learn what other people know best.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

324. “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

325. “It’s funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

326. “There are bodies buried everywhere you just have to know where to look.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

327. “Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

328. “Not everything is about money. You didn’t even say, hello. You are not your sad little wallet.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

329. “Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born?”

— Chuck Palahniuk

330. “People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

331. “These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

332. “You see, life only turns out good or bad for only a little bit. And then it turns out some other way.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

333. “We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

334. “This is less teaching than damage control. You may as well paint a house that’s on fire.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

335. “Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

336. “Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s the only way they can get anything really finished.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

337. “Imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption. People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean. White noise.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

338. “You cannot be the person they know and the great, glorious person you want to become. Not at the same time.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

339. “What we think of as Halloween is really the product of media barons, city mayors, and candy-makers. You know, before the 1920s, Halloween was really a terrible, terrible night.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

340. “A knife, it felt like a knife, and I’d discovered that despite everything that’s happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

341. “Every character sees the world through a framework of education and experience that they’re proud experts about. To write a character, find out what they know best, and THEN you’ll know how they’ll describe a “hot day.” Or a “pretty girl.””

— Chuck Palahniuk

342. “People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

343. “Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

344. “We just had a near-life experience!”

— Chuck Palahniuk

345. “Let’s all embrace someone near us. Pick someone special to you. Tell this someone how you feel.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

346. “In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

347. “And the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

348. “There’s an old saying: ‘No piece of writing is ever finished, it’s just abandoned.’ But my own rule is: No piece of work is done until you want to kill everyone involved in the publishing process, especially yourself.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

349. “Find good in what the world says is evil.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

350. “To hell with housework, our top priority has always been between our legs.”

— Chuck Palahniuk