Chuck Palahniuk

“You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.”

“Any time some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you're a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink.”

“Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.”

“I want to have your abortion.”

“This isn’t really death,’ Tyler says. ‘We’ll be legend. We won’t grow old.’ I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you’re thinking of vampires.”

“Every day: Wear sunblock.Cover your gray.Do not go insane.Eat less fats and sugars.Do more sit-ups.Don’t start forgetting stuff.Trim the hair in your ears.Take calcium.Moisturize. Every day.Freeze in time to stay in one place forever.Do not get frigging old.”

“Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.”

“We're all trapped. It's always 1734. All of us, we're stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic.”

“The only funny part about Colonial Dunsboro is maybe it's too authentic, but for all the wrong reasons. This whole crowd of losers and nutcases who hide out here because they can't make it in the real world, in real jobs — isn't this why we left England in the first place? To establish our own alternate reality. Weren't the Pilgrims pretty much the crackpots of their time? For sure, instead of just wanting to believe something different about God's love, the losers I work with want to find salvation through compulsive behaviors.”

“The skin along the parts in her hair, the skin above and behind the doctor's ears, is as clear and white as the skin inside her other tan lines must look. If women knew how their ears come across, the firm fleshy edge, the little dark hood at the top, all the smooth contours coiled and channeling you to the tight darkness inside, well, more women would wear their hair down.”

“This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.”

“Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.”

“How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash. ”

“At That Moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay.It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.”

“We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

“Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.”

“Self improvement is masturbation. Now self destruction...”

“Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.”

“These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”

“About my boss, Tyler tells me, if I'm really angry, I should go to the post office and fill out a change-of-address card and have all his mail forwarded to Rugby, North Dakota.”

“The first rule of fight club is, you don't talk about fight club.”

“This isn't about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.”

“To repeat, the way you get to the huge, impossible yes is, you start collecting a lot of easy, small yeses.”

“Cassie Wright knows, the moment you make yourself available to any man, he starts to take you for granted”

“Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.”

“Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.”

“people had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. nobody realized how boring it would become. with the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. on a roller coaster. at a movie. still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. you know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids. the test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. and because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. real elation. real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.the laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.”

“People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.”

“I fainted....and you ate my ass?You fed me my own ass?”

“You don’t care where I live or how I feel, or what I eat or how I feed my kids or how I pay the doctor if I get sick, and yes I am stupid and bored and weak, but I am still your responsibility.”

“Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.”

“I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not.”

“Hey, you created me! I didn't create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!”

“You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it.”

“Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you think every thing you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned.”

“The girl who lives in 8G used to be a lovely charming girl, but the girl is a monster bitch monster. The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing so she won't commit to anything. ”

“Dude, the place is filling up," I say. "It feels like we're living in the bottom half of an hourglass."Like somehow we're running out of time.”

“Make me into anything, but just love me.”

“It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.”

“Black-and-white chickens stagger around Colonial Dunsboros, chickens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chickens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled. There's an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it's made visible.”

“Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.”

“I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.”

“Anymore, no one's mind is their own.”

“And the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.”

“Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. 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, but now they call this free will.At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.”

“Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?”

“No, whether a woman is a concubine to fuck or a damsel to redeem, she's always just some passive object to fulfill a man's purpose.”

“That’s the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our communityChuck Palahniuk in interview with TMO”

“I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that.”

“Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.”