Chuck Palahniuk

“Listen up. Rant would tell people: ‘You’re a different human being to everybody you meet.’Sometimes Rant said, ‘You only ever is in the eyes of other folks.’If you were going to carve a quote on his grave, his favorite saying was: ‘The future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday.”

“You get a glass tank, put it where the TV used to be, and all you get is a lizard—something sostupid that every time the maid moves a rock the lizard thinks it’s been relocated miles away.”

“The air will always be to filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.”

“We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.”

“I disconnect the telephone to keep the outside world in it's correct place.”

“I suppose it’s comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse things to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict.”

“I am Jack's smirking revenge.”

“Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: if someone yells “stop!”, goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: the fights are bare knuckle. No shirt, no shoes, no weapons. Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight.”

“Griping isn't the same as creating something. Rebelling isn't rebuilding. Ridiculing isn't replacing. We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.”

“We're all of us haunted and haunting.”

“For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.”

“If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.”

“No, none of us seem so very real.We're only supporting characters in the lives of each other.Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.”

“As the French say, who doesn't like getting their butt sucked?”

“I am John's raging bile duct.”

“Jump way back to one time, Evie and me did this fashion shoot in a junk yard, in a slaughterhouse, in a mortuary. We'd go anywhere to look good by comparison, and what I realize is mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.”

“With my eyes closed, I ask if she knows how this will all turn out."Long-term or short-term?" she asks.Both."Long-term," she says, "we're all going to die. Then our bodies will rot. No surprise there. Short-term, we're going to live happily ever after."Really?"Really," she says. "So don't sweat it.”

“Fertility says, "Can you relax and just let things happen?"I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen?"And Joy," she says, "and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment." She says all the wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "You don't have to control everything," she says. "You can't control everything."But you can be ready for disaster.A sign goes by saying, Buckle Up."If you worry about disaster all of the time, that's what you are going to get," Fertility says.”

“The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you’d be ruined. Overdosed on information.”

“Picture anybody growing up so stupid he didn't know that hope is just another phase you'll grow out of.”

“You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need. We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”

“The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.”

“The little boy smiled back at all the angry faces glaring in at him. And the little boy blew kisses. ”

“For the first time in longer than I can remember, I feel peaceful. Not happy. Not sad. Not anxious. Not horny. Just all the higher parts of my brain closing up shop. The cerebral cortex. The cerebellum. That's where my problem is. I'm now simplifying myself. Somewhere balanced in the perfect middle between happiness and sadness. Because sponges never have a bad day.”

“Some people are just born human, the rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there.”

“Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.”

“Its only after you've lost everything," Tyler says, "that you're free to do anything.”

“There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with.”

“you can make mean anything.”

“May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete. ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 5”

“My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.”

“No matter what else you came up against, if you could smile and laugh while a monkey did you with chestnuts in a dank concrete basement while somebody took pictures, well, any other situation would be a piece of cake”

“Ако не знаеш какво искаш - каза портиерът, - накрая ти се натрупват сума ти неща, дето не ги искаш.”

“Tyler lies back and asks, "If Marilyn Monroe were alive right now, what would she be doing?"I say, goodnight.The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling and Tyler says, "Clawing at the lid of her coffin.”

“Love and life belongs to great risk.”

“Fathers. Mothers. With all their caring and attention. They will f--- you up, every time.”

“Kill me if I ever look that Bad" . . . "Dude, what are you saying? . . . On the TV? That is you, dude. From like five years ago.”

“No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.”

“Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.”

“Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer . . . or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded--the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty. [ellipses original]”

“Your dad was in a street gang?" My adopted dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. Him, me, and my adopted mom lived in the suburbs in an English Tudor house with a gigantic basement where he fiddled with model trains. The other dads were lawyers and research chemists, but they all ran model trains. Every weekend they could, they'd load into a family van and cruise into the city for research. Snapping pictures of gang members. Gang graffiti. Sex workers walking their tracks. Litter and pollution and homeless heroin addicts. All this, they'd study and bicker about, trying to outdo each other with the most realistic, the grittiest scenes of urban decay they could create in HO train scale in a subdivision basement”

“A male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.”

“The only person we'll hate more than each other is ourselves.”

“Just each of us being me, me, me first. The murderer, the victim, the witness each of us thinks our role is the lead.Probably that goes for anybody in the world.”

“Nuestro deber es enseñar a esos hombres y mujeres la libertad a través de la esclavitud; y el coraje a través del miedo.”

“Most people would never admit it, but they'd been bitching since they were born. As soon as their head popped out into that bright delivery-room light, nothing had been right. Nothing had been as comfortable or felt so good. Just the effort it took to keep your stupid physical body alive, just finding food and cooking it and dishwashing, the keeping warm and bathing and sleeping, the walking and bowel movements and ingrown hairs, it was all getting to be too much work.”

“The whole island was exactly what a kid growing up in some trailer park--say some dump like Tecumseh Lake, Georgia--would dream about. This kid would turn out all the lights in the trailer while her mom was at work. She'd lie down flat on her back, on the matted-down orange shag carpet in the living room. The carpet smelling like somebody stepped in a dog pile. The orange melted black in spots from cigarette burns. The ceiling was water-stained. she'd fold her arms across her chest, and she could picture life in this kind of place. It would be that time--late at night--when your ears reach out for any sound. When you can see more with your eyes closed than open. The fish skeleton. From the first time she held a crayon, that's what she'd draw.”

“Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art. May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.”

“The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact.”

“Anything pretty,' Claire will tell you, 'it's only for sale because no one wants it.”