Top 500 Chuck Palahniuk Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Control the things you can control. As for the rest – God bless it all.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

402. “What we don’t understand we can make mean anything.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

403. “Almost all the time, you tell yourself you’re loving somebody when you’re just using them. This only looks like love.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

404. “You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need. We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

405. “Everybody’s trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

406. “Imagine if Jesus chased you around, trying to catch you and save your soul. Not just a patient passive God, but a hardworking, aggressive bloodhound. We want the criminal to confess during the trial. We want him to be exposed in the drawing room scene, surrounded by his peers. The detective is a shepherd, and we want the criminal back in the fold, returned to us. We love him. We miss him. We want to hug him. Mona.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

407. “I have a lot of money.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

408. “This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

409. “Consider that the earth is a processing plant, a factory. Picture a tumbler used to polish rocks: a rolling drum filled with water and sand. Consider that your soul is dropped in as an ugly rock, some raw mineral or natural resource, crude oil, mineral ore. And all conflict and pain is the abrasive that rubs us, polishes our soul, refines us, teaches and finishes us over lifetime after lifetime.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

410. “I write because it’s a way of presenting something without having to be there.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

411. “You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you, never wanted you, in all probability he hates you. It’s not the worst thing that could happen.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

412. “Porque tener hijos es el opio del pueblo.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

413. “It’s called a culling song. In some ancient cultures, they sand it to children during famines or droughts, anytime the tribe had outgrown its land. It was sung to warriors injured in accidents or the very old or anyone dying. It was used to end misery and pain. It’s a lullaby.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

414. “Mit einem Schwert in deinem Herzen sterben.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

415. “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

416. “I hate how I don’t feel real enough unless people are watching.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

417. “You love me. You ignore me. You save my life, then you cook my mother into soap.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

418. “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

419. “Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?”

— Chuck Palahniuk

420. “If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?”

— Chuck Palahniuk

421. “Demon or angel or evil spirit, I just need something to show itself. Ghoulie or ghosty or long-legged beastie, I just want my hand held.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

422. “If it is the case that love does survive death, then you may consider this to be a happy ending. Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Happily ever after or not.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

423. “Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

424. “Because after you’ve crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them. And there’s no escaping from constant escape. Distracting ourselves. Avoiding confrontation. Getting past the moment. Jacking off. Television. Denial.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

425. “You don’t care where I live or how I feel, or what I eat or how I feed my kids or how I pay the doctor if I get sick, and yes I am stupid and bored and weak, but I am still your responsibility.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

426. “You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

427. “The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

428. “Torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

429. “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.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

430. “We’d turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we’d survive to talk about.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

431. “Now this is the first rule of fight club: There is nothing a blue collar Nobody in Oregon with a public school education can imagine that a million-billion people haven’t already done...”

— Chuck Palahniuk

432. “This isn’t about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

433. “What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

434. “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

435. “The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

436. “I still love him so much I’ll hide any amount of conjugated estrogen in his food. So much I’ll do anything to destroy him.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

437. “In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was kind of tumbler. The sale as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. This isn’t suffering. It’s erosion.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

438. “Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that’s when we can start talking about equal rights.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

439. “She’s not wearing makeup so her face just looks like skin.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

440. “If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

441. “This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and right-away destruction of civilization.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

442. “Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it’s the things you don’t do, and you get screwed.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

443. “Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn’t bother to torture you if she didn’t.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

444. “Any time some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you’re a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

445. “That quest for something pretty. A cheat. A cliche. Flowers and Christmas lights, it’s what we’re programmed to love.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

446. “I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

447. “To preserve yourself as the center of the world, to stay your own best authority on everything, your own expert on all topics, infallible, omniscient. Always, every time of the month, forever: Use birth control.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

448. “Let me be the ring leader in your guilt gang-bang.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

449. “If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

450. “Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion – painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.”

— Chuck Palahniuk