Chuck Palahniuk

“Her mom and dad are both doctors and want her to follow her dream, not turn out the way they have, no matter how much it costs them.”

“The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”

“We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.”

“The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.”

“Recycling and speed limits are bullshit. They're like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.”

“Maybe we should always assume the worst.”

“Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered.”

“With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.”

“Remember this. The people you're trying to step on, we're everyone you depend on. We're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you're asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life.We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact. So don't fuck with us.”

“Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.”

“Angel says that rich people don't like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.”

“What you forget when you're planning a hijack by yourself is somewhere along the line, you might need to neglect your hostages just long enough so you can use the bathroom.”

“People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.”

“This is how we must look to God.”

“You ever wonder when god's coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?”

“For official record, announce instructor, the state requires no epic hero. No strive achieve personal celebrity of spotlight and applause. Lectures instructor, the state desires best ideal perform as mediocre. No gain attention showboat. No buffoon. Best effort so occur average. Suppress climbing ego. Become ordinary. Invisible.”

“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.”

“The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.”

“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.”

“How can you possibly believe he really loves you?” Miss Sneezy looks from the Mother to the Saint to Mr. Whittier’s hand.“You have no choice,” Mr. Whittier tells her. “If you need to be loved.”

“You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,' he says, 'the same way this theater seems to digest people.' With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky and growing mold, branched with arms and legs.Other events—the ones you can’t digest—they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can’t talk about, they rot you from the inside out. Until you’re Cassandra’s wet shadow on the ground. Sunk in your own yellow protein mud.But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell—you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good. Those are stories as important as food. Those are stories you can use to make people laugh or cry or sick. Or scared. To make people feel the way you felt. To help exhaust that past moment for them and for you. Until that moment is dead.Consumed. Digested. Absorbed.”

“People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.”

“In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaringshape-outlines we have to blink against.”

“If there’s any trick to doing a job you hate . . . Mrs. Clark says it’s to find a job you hate even more.”

“That’s how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It re-creates some forgotten terror. Something we’d like to think we’ve grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It’s something you’d hoped was healed.”

“When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.”

“Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide. ”

“Some stories, she’d say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be. ”

“They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful. Because now she looks so—bad. ”

“The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.”

“Kids, she says. When they’re little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you’re the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it’s just the opposite. After that, you’re either a liar or a fool or a villain.”

“Without animals, there would be no humanity. In a world of just people, people will mean nothing . . .”

“Daytime television, you can tell who’s watching by the three kinds of commercials. Either it’s clinics for drying out drunks. Or it’s law firms who want to settle injury suits. Or it’s schools offering mail-order vocational degrees to make you a bookkeeper. A private detective. Or a locksmith. If you’re watching daytime television, this is your new demographic. You’re a drunk. Or a cripple. Or an idiot. ”

“To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days. ”

“An important part of building a new culture was allowing people to complain about their past. At first, the more they complained, the worse the past would seem. But by venting, people could start to resolve the past. By bitching and bitching and bitching, they could exhaust the drama of their own horror stories. Grow bored. Only then could they accept a new story for their lives. Move forward.”

“Personne ne veut reconnaître que nous sommes des drogués de musique. Ce n'est tout bonnement pas possible. Personne n'est drogué de musique, de télévision, de radio. Simplement, il nous en faut plus et plus, nous en avons besoin, plus de chaines, un écran plus grand, plus de volume. Nous ne supportons pas de nous en passer, mais, non personne n'est drogué.Nous pourrions l'éteindre dès que nous le voudrions.”

“In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.”

“The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.”

“Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb. ”

“With every lecture, you’re forced to look again at every choice you’ve made over the lesson-by-lesson chain of your entire life. And after all these years, you see how little you have to work with, how limited your life and education have been. How scant was your courage and curiosity. Not to mention your expectations.”

“You’re training a new employee,' says Mrs. Clark, 'to take over your boring old job.' When you raise a child.”

“Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone.”

“The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.”

“Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That’s the earth. Why it goes around. We’re the rocks. And what happens to us—the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse—why, that’s just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.”

“We’d turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we’d survive to talk about.”

“Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.”

“That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.”

“This is the greatest momemt of your life and your out missing it”

“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.”

“Even if I overcompensate, nobody will ever want me. Not Seth. Not my folks. You can’t kiss someone who has no lips. Oh, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I’ll be anybody you want me to be.”