50 Fucked-Up Chuck Palahniuk Quotes That Will Make You Re-Evaluate Everything

50 quotes

When you understand that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. 

“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…”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Immortality, Existentialism, Meaning Of Life, Life, Being Alive

“On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

“The most boring thing in the entire world is nudity. The second most boring thing is honesty.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Boring, Nudity, Honesty, Human Condition, Boredom

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

— Chuck Palahniuk, goodreads.com

Tagged: Boredom, Life, Excitment

“What if reality is nothing but some disease?”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Reality, Life, Perception

“If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variable…”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: History, Chaos, Understanding, Free Will, Life

“What you don't understand you can make mean anything.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Understanding, Perception

“When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Future, Past, Narrative, Self-Concept, Autonomy

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: disaster, Change, Failure, Redemption

“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Life, The Unknown, Uncertainty, Wanting Someone You Can't Have

“What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Expectations, Happiness, Pain, Suffering, Heaven

“Sex pretty much cures everything.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Sex

“Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Chaos, Freedom, Happiness, Pain

“If we can forgive what’s been done to us... If we can forgive what we’ve done to others... If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Playing The Victim, Peace, Saving The World, Pain, Stories

“You gain power by pretending to be weak.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Power, Control, strength, Weakness

“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.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Self-Concept, Individuality

“You can’t fool people into loving you.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Love, Relationships

“In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Imagination, Religion

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

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Chaos, Direction, Making Mistakes, Foolishness

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

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Life, Being noticed

“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, amazon.com

Tagged: Past, Future, Lives, Nostalgia

“The future you have, tomorrow, won't be the same future you had, yesterday.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Future, Past, Change

“You're a different human being to everybody you meet.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Perception, Human Nature, humanity

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

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Coping Mechanisms, Lust

“Anything you can acquire is only another thing you'll lose.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Things, Possessions, Acquiring Things, Owning Things, Materialism

“Everything before now is just a story I carry around. I guess that would apply to anybody in the world. What I need is a new story about who I am. What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Stories, Self-Concept

“The only thing I know is everything you love will die.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Death, Mortality, Life, Love

“That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, barnesandnoble.com

Tagged: Writing, Words, Life, Living, Reflection

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Advertising, Happiness, Consumerism, Capitalism

“People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, amazon.com

Tagged: Pain, Holding On, Moving On, Moving Forward, Self-Direction