Chuck Palahniuk — Quotes from Author's Books

You’ll need to suffer to make any real art.

Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a hundred years from now?

Oh, the proof that one day you're thinking and hauling yourself around, and the next, you're cold fertilizer, worm buffet.

Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.

You can repeat the same miracles over and over as long as no one remembers the last time.

You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden.

What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.

The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.

The damaged love the damaged. True fact.

Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.
Just for the record, the weather today is increasing turmoil with a possible physical and emotional breakdown.
Just for the record, the weather today is foggy with widely conflicting stories about your
father’s cause of death.

If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention. If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window. You had their full attention. People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. And when they spoke, they weren't just telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.

Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value. Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melodramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away.

Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

And maybe men say they're glad not to give birth, all the pain and blood, but really that's just so much sour grapes. For sure, men can't do anything near as incredible. Upper body strength, abstract thought, phalluses—any advantages men appear to have are pretty token.
You can't even hammer a nail with a phallus. 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.