Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
-
In Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth.
-
The whole idea of men creating perfect robot women for their own pleasure, it happens every day. The most 'beautiful' women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotypes of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of Cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look.
-
Their teeth white, as if they never used teeth for anything except to smile.
-
When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy them, but now they call this free will. At least the Greeks were being honest.
-
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
-
It simply makes sense that I should miss my parents more than they miss me, especially when you consider that they only loved me for thirteen years while I loved them my entire life.
-
Sure, everybody wants to play God, but for me it's a full-time job.
-
Going to spring break at Ft. Lauderdale, getting drunk and flashing your breasts isn't an act of personal empowerment. It's you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of a patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to know she is even in distress.
-
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.
-
'Every apostle or disciple,' Mrs. Clarke says, 'as much as their running to follow they're savior-they're running just as hard to escape something else.'
-
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.
-
You can't unfuck a kid. Once you fuck a kid, you can't get that genie back in the bottle.
-
The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact. Every play-by-play description on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds. Even Sound and light can only go so fast.
-
The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our head says, 'I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew.' Meaning: I may be me - but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU.
-
The journalist researches a story. The novelist imagines it.What’s funny is, you’d be amazed at the amount of time a novelist has to spend with people in order to create this single lonely voice. This seemingly isolated world.It’s hard to call any of my novels 'fiction.'
-
I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong, again.
-
'I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong again.' p76
-
Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too.This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine.
-
'What matters,' Sister Vigilante says, 'is, people need a monster they can believe in.' A true horrible enemy. A demon to define themselves against. Otherwise, it's just us versus us.
-
Her dress, swimsuit-tight, leotard-tight, her pantyhose run with women pedaling bicycles going nowhere at a thousand calories an hour.
-
Either an ancient cursed Egyptian mummy has come back to life and is trying to kill the people next door, or they're watching a movie.
-
Maybe this is why so many serial killers work in pairs. It's nice not to feel alone in a world full of victims or enemies.
-
If we can forgive what's been done to us... If we can forgive what we've done to others... If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.
-
That's how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It recreates some forgotten terror. Something we'd like to think we're grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It's something you'd hoped was healed.