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Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.
It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Fight Club
The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, online lecture, Dec. 5, 2004
All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.
The murderer, the victim, the witness, each of us thinks our role is the lead.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
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.
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.
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Oct. 30, 2002
The things you own end up owning you.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Fight Club
When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.
For six months I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Fight Club
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.
Without sacrifice, without death, we would have nothing.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Fight Club
You still believe in death... that's just so... quaint. Well, sorry to pop your death bubble, but there's no such thing. So make the best of things. Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking. Don't waste good drugs on killing yourself. Share them with friends and have a party. Or send them to me.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, The Independent Review, Mar. 25, 2004
There is nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Fight Club
We live and die and anything else is just delusion.
The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is press coverage.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Survivor
The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Salon.com Letters, Aug. 26, 2003
What you don't understand you can make mean anything.
When you go out with a drunk, you'll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you're drinking, drinking is okay. Two's company. Drinking is fun. If there's a bottle, even if your glass isn't empty, he'll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
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.
When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
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.
Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master, and nobody had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Fight Club
After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Choke
Nobody wants to worship you if you have the same problems, the same bad breath and messy hair and hangnails, as a regular person. You have to be everything regular people aren’t. Where they fail, you have to go all the way. Be what people are too afraid to be. Become whom they admire. People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Survivor
Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Fight Club
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Survivor
Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Survivor
The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn't know they were stupid.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Phoenix
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
You gain power by pretending to be weak.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Choke
You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
In a world where vows are worthless. Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Lullaby
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep... and you're never really awake.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Fight Club
What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Damned
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.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Lullaby
You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, attributed, How Writers Write
Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.
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