Chuck Palahniuk

“We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”

“I don't want to die without any scars.”

“My mom says, "Do you know what the AIDS memorial quilt is all about?"Jump to how much I hate my brother at this moment.I bought this fabric because I thought it would make a nice panel for Shane," Mom says. "We just ran into some problems with what to sew on it."Give me amnesia.Flash.Give me new parents.Flash.Your mother didn't want to step on any toes," Dad says. He twists a drumstick off and starts scraping the meat onto a plate. "With gay stuff you have to be so careful since everything means something in secret code. I mean, we didn't want to give people the wrong idea."My Mom leans over to scoop yams onto my plate, and says, "Your father wanted a black border, but black on a field of blue would mean Shane was excited by leather sex, you know, bondage and discipline, sado and masochism." She says, "Really, those panels are to help the people left behind."Strangers are going to see us and see Shane's name," my dad says. "We didn't want them thinking things."The dishes all start their slow clockwise march around the table. The stuffing. The olives. The cranberry sauce. "I wanted pink triangles but all the panels have pink triangles," my mom says. "It's the Nazi symbol for homosexuals." She says,"Your father suggested black triangles, but that would mean Shane was a lesbian. It looks like female pubic hair. The black triangle does."My father says, "Then I wanted a green border, but it turns out that would mean Shane was a male prostitute."My mom says, "We almost chose a red border, but that would mean fisting. Brown would mean either scat or rimming, we couldn't figure which."Yellow," my father says, "means watersports."A lighter shade of blue," Mom says, "would mean just regular oral sex."Regular white," my father says, "would mean anal. White could also mean Shane was excited by men wearing underwear." He says, "I can't remember which."My mother passes me the quilted chicken with the rolls still warm inside.We're supposed to sit and eat with Shane dead all over the table in front of us.Finally we just gave up," my mom says, "and I made a nice tablecloth out of the material."Between the yams and the stuffing, Dad looks down at his plate and says, "Do you know about rimming?"I know it isn't table talk.And fisting?" my mom asks.I say, I know. I don't mention Manus and his vocational porno magazines.We sit there, all of us around a blue shroud with the turkey more like a big dead baked animal than ever, the stuffing chock full of organs you can still recognize, the heart and gizzard and liver, the gravy thick with cooked fat and blood. The flower centerpiece could be a casket spray.Would you pass the butter, please?" my mother says. To my father she says, "Do you know what felching is?”

“I could imagine myself becoming one of Marla's stories.”

“For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.”

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.”

“The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.”

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.”

“For sure, they don't teach you this in history class, but in colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing less than fair game for everybody to nail. Men or women, anybody bent over had no way of knowing who was doing the ram job, and this was the real reason you never wanted to end up here unless you had a family member or a friend who'd stand with you the whole time. To protect you. To watch your ass, for real.”

“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”

“Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.”

“If you're going to read this, don't bother.”

“At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor.”

“I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. I am Jack's Broken Heart.”

“I know this because Tyler knows this.”

“Uno empieza con las pajas y llega a las orgías. Uno fuma un poco de hierba y acaba metiéndose caballo. Es esta cultura nuestra de lo más grande, lo más fuerte, lo más rápido y lo mejor. La palabra clave es progresar.En América, si tu adicción no se renueva y mejora constantemente, eres un perdedor.”

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”

“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”

“Es gracioso que la belleza del arte tenga mucho más que ver con el marco que con la obra de arte en sí misma.”

“Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.”

“You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm.”

“What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.”

“My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.”

“The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.”

“The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing and so she won't commit to anything.”

“Yes, these are bruises from fighting and I'm okay with that.”

“Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.”

“I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, “Why?”Why did I cause so much pain?Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love?I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.We are not special.We are not crap or trash, either.We just are.We just are, and what happens just happens.And God says, “No, that’s not right.”Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can’t teach God anything.”

“For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.”

“At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”

“By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember.”

“Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.”

“You have to give up! you have to give up!You have to realize that someday you will die,Until you know that, you are useless!”

“I say let me never be complete, I say may I never be content,I say deliver me from Swedish furniture, I say deliver me from clever arts, I say deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth,I say you have to give up! I say evolve, and let the chips fall where they may!”

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”

“We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...”

“The things you used to own, now they own you.”

“You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

“In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.”

“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

“I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by 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.”

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”

“Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I'm sick and tired of it.How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages....The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and the tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.”

“Skinny guys fight till they're burger.”

“All you can do is hope for a pattern to emerge, and sometimes it never does. Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that.”

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”

“As young people we want something to slow us down and keep us trapped in one place long enough to look below the surface of the world. That disaster is a car crash or a war. To make us sit still. It can be getting cancer or getting pregnant. The important part is how it seems to catch us by surprise. That disaster stops us from living the life we'd planned as children - a life of constant dashing around.”

“Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.”