Chuck Palahniuk

“You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.”

“Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.”

“Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?”

“What would Tyler Durden do?”

“Because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.”

“If you're ever in a big hotel lobby, and they start to play "The Blue Danube Waltz," get the hell out. Don't think. Run.”

“Now this is the first rule of fight club: There is nothing a blue collar Nobody in Oregon with a public school education can imagine that a million-billion people haven't already done...”

“Also consider that someday, when you’re dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.”

“What if reality is nothing but some disease?”

“When you ate her tuna casserole, you didn’t talk or flip through a National Geographic. Your eyes and ears stayed inside your mouth. Your whole world kept inside your mouth, feeling and careful for the little balled-up tinfoils Irene Casey would hide in the tuna parts. A side effect of eating slow was, you naturally, genuinely tasted, and the food tasted better. Could be other ladies were better cooks, but you’d never notice.”

“Some mythological fat asswipe drives our national economy.”

“Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.”

“Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love.”

“Just for the record, waking up on drugs with your pubic hair shaved and something plastic stuck in your vagina doesn't necessarily make you a real artist.”

“Just for the record, being smeared with shit and naked in the wilderness, spattered with pink vomit, this does not necessarily make you a real artist.”

“It can only take a moment to waste the rest of your life.”

“If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?”

“Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE.”

“It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.”

“During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan bloodlines pure,and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could ever go into wide distribution.”

“Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.”

“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.”

“We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.”

“Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.”

“If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.”

“Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.”

“It's because we're so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and legs everybody has. We're so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we're trained to want.”

“Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.”

“I mean, I'm just tired of being wrong all the time just because I'm a guy. I mean how many times can everybody tell you that you're the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy. I mean a male, chauvinist pig isn't born, hes made, and more and more of them are being made by women. After long enough you just roll over and accept the fact that you're a sexist, bigoted, insensitive, crude, cretinist cretin. Women are right. You're wrong. You get used to the idea. You live down to expectations. Even if the shoe doesn't fit, you'll shrink to fill it. I mean, in a world without god aren't mothers the new god? The last sacred unassailable position. Isn't motherhood the last perfect magical miracle? But a miracle that isn't possible for men, and maybe men say they're glad not to give birth, all the pain and blood, but really that's just so much sour grapes. For sure, men can't do anything near as incredible. Upper body strength, abstract thought, phalluses - any advantage men appear to have are pretty token. You can't even hammer a nail with a phallus. Women are already born so far ahead ability - wise. The day a men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.”

“The joke is, we all have the same punchline.”

“You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.”

“You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.”

“Everyone's in their own personal coma.”

“All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.”

“Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.”

“We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.”

“It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.”

“Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.”

“A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.”

“More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.”

“All I do is track a profane route to something (I hope) profound. Like swimming a river of shit for a kiss.”

“You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away.”

“Just for the record, the weather today is bitter with occasional fits of jealous rage.”

“The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.”

“You can guess this is how men have been handling Eva's hostility for her whole life. Just distract her. Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away. That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.”

“She's not wearing makeup so her face just looks like skin.”

“The problem in this case was you can't be a middle-aged virgin in America without something being wrong with you. People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weaker.”

“Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.”

“A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?""Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.”

“Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.”