35 Quotes From Chuck Palahniuk That Will Open Your Mind

1. “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.”-Chuck Palahniuk

2. “The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”-Chuck Palahniuk

3. “All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”-Chuck Palahniuk

4. “We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”-Chuck Palahniuk

5. “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”-Chuck Palahniuk

6. “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.”-Chuck Palahniuk

7. “Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.”-Chuck Palahniuk

8. “I don’t want to die without any scars.”-Chuck Palahniuk

9. “The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”-Chuck Palahniuk

10. “This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.”-Chuck Palahniuk

11. “The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. 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.

If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.”-Chuck Palahniuk

12. “You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”-Chuck Palahniuk

13. “You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.”-Chuck Palahniuk

14. “You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”-Chuck Palahniuk

15. “No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention.

Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.”-Chuck Palahniuk

16. “When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”-Chuck Palahniuk

17. You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We’re all part of the same compost heap. We’re all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”-Chuck Palahniuk

18. “If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character…Would you slow down? Or speed up?”-Chuck Palahniuk

19. “The things you used to own, now they own you.”-Chuck Palahniuk

20. “A girl calls and asks, “Does it hurt very much to die?”Well, sweetheart,” I tell her, “yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.”-Chuck Palahniuk

21. “If you love something set it free, but don’t be surprised if it comes back with herpes.”-Chuck Palahniuk

22. “Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.”-Chuck Palahniuk

23. “Ok. You fuck me, then snub me. You love me, you hate me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is this a pretty accurate description of our relationship.”-Chuck Palahniuk

24. “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

25. “At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”-Chuck Palahniuk

26. “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.”-Chuck Palahniuk

27. “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.”-Chuck Palahniuk

28. “If you don’t know what you want,” the doorman said, “you end up with a lot you don’t.”-Chuck Palahniuk

29. “Artificial over stimulations seemed like the perfect way to stifle a generation of young people who wanted more and more from a world where less and less was available.”-Chuck Palahniuk

30. “She wanted a choice beyond: Housewife versus lawyer. Madonna versus whore. An option not mired in the lingering detritus of some Victorian-era dream.”-Chuck Palahniuk

31. “She’d exchanged her dreams of her parents for the dogma of her instructors, but neither of those outlooks were innately her own.”-Chuck Palahniuk

32. “She reflected on her time in Paris and thought how it seemed as if she’d spent half her life drinking wine in bed and covered with contusions. This, it occurred to her, was how it must feel to be Melanie Griffith.”-Chuck Palahniuk

33. “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.”-Chuck Palahniuk

34.“No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.”-Chuck Palahniuk

35. “Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.”-Chuck Palahniuk