Chuck Palahniuk

“Churches in the outside world, my brother told me, were just the local stores that sold people lies made up in the distant factories of giant religions.”

“Whatever happened in the world was a decree from God. A task to be completed. Any crying or joy just got in the way of being useful. Any emotion was decadent. Anticipation or regret was a silly extra. A luxury.”

“On a night without moon or stars you can't see a thing, but you can imagine anything.”

“Adam said the other blessing you have to give up in the outside world is darkness.”

“In the outside world, he told me, there was no real silence.”

“The hardest blessing you give up is silence.”

“In the outside world, he said, people were visited in their houses by spirits they called television.Spirits spoke to people through what they called the radio.”

“The same as most prayers, the bulk of what you hear is complaints and demands. Help me. Hear me. Lead me. Forgive me.”

“The girls you meet are never very far from their worst-case scenario.”

“Pimple young. Giggling young. Silly young and stupid as me.”

“Full-time drudge. Part-time God.”

“He can't live with knowing the future and not being able to save anyone.”

“Some want to die but are just looking for my permission. Some want to die and just need a little encouragement. A little push.”

“Just for the record, how I feel right now is very terrific.”

“The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God’s most selfish children would steal God’s greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.Only God has the right to surprise His children with death.”

“You realize that there's no point in doing anything if nobody's watching.”

“..."The most boring thing in the entire world," Brandy says, "is nudity."The second most boring thing, she says, is honesty....The third most boring thing in the entire world is your sorry-assed past. So Brandy never asked me anything.”

“The sound shivers through the walls, through the table, through the window frame, and into my finger. These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics. Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed... and this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.”

“Something foreign is always living itself through you. Your whole life is the vehicle for something to come to earth An evil spirit. A theory. Amarketing campaign. A political strategy. A religious doctrine.”

“Everywhere, words are mixing. Words and lyrics and dialogue are mixing in a soup that could trigger a chain reaction. Maybe acts of God are justthe right combination of media junk thrown out into the air. The wrong words collide and call up an earthquake. The way rain dances called storms,the right combination of words might call down tornadoes. Too many advertising jingles commingling could be behind global warming. Too manytelevision reruns bouncing around might cause hurricanes. Cancer. AIDS.”

“You study any pretty democracy, from the ancient Greeks forward, and you'll see that the only way each system functions is with a working class of slaves. Peons to haul the garbage so the upper crust can campaign and vote.”

“People accepted the worst from each other, screaming and slapping. Divorce and abortion were never a plot option. If this was love or just inertia, Misty couldn't tell.”

“Çarpıima partisi, depresyonunuzu elektroşokla tedavi etmek gibi değil midir?”

“You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.”

“I'm an invisible monster. I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse.”

“Everygeneration 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 ourgeneration's clothes and hair suddenly retro.”

“This isn't about love and hate," Helen says. It's about control. People don't sit down and read a poem to kill their child. They just want the child tosleep. They just want to dominate. No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have your own way. The masochist bullies the sadist intoaction. The most passive person is actually an aggressor.”

“You must be kidding." She says, "Having the power of life and death isn't enough. Youmust wonder what other poems are in that book."Hitting me as fast as a hiccup, me resting my weight on my good foot, just staring at her, I say no.She says, "Maybe you can live forever."And I say no.And she says, "Maybe you can make anyone love you."No.And she says, "Maybe you can turn straw into gold."And I say no and turn on my heel."Maybe you could bring about world peace," she says.”

“Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a hundred years from now?" she says.”

“Her haunting me. The way a song stays in your head. The way you think life should be. How anything holds yourattention. How your past goes with you into every day of your future.”

“As the child outlives the father,so must the character bury the author.”

“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying, organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”

“If you lose your nerve before you hit the bottom, Tyler says, you never really succeed.”

“I am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed, sense of rejection.”

“The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or art director says.Like Tyler says, even a souffle looks pumped.”

“To my mind, those who can, do. Those who can't, gripe.”

“Every job too miserable most times, is nothing compared to just waiting.”

“She'd lived through something the rest of them could never imagine. So much torture and horror that she didn't need to tell people about it. She'd never need drama or joy or pain ever again.”

“Bazı insanlar insanoğlu olarak doğar.Gerş kalanımız ise insan olabilmek için hayatımız boyunca uğraşırız.”

“Pero si la realidad no es más que un conjuro, y no quieres realmente lo que crees que quieres... —Acerca su cara a mi cara y dice—: Si no tienes libre albedrío. No sabes qué sabes en realidad. Realmente no amas a quien solamente crees que amas. ¿Qué razones te quedan para vivir?”

“¿Podemos tener suficiente, o conseguir un poco solamente nos hará ansiar más?”

“To Mr. Jones, she said, imagine you're looking up at a blue sky, and imagine a tiny airplane skywriting the letter Z. Then let the wind erase the letter. Then imagine the plane writing the letter Y. Let the wind erase it. Then the letter X. Erase it. Then the letter W. Let the wind erase it.”

“İnsan sevdiklerini öldürür diye bir söz vardır ya; aslında bakın insanı öldüren de hep sevdiğidir.”

“There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice. None of this matters. We’re just warming up.”

“I'm not so much a good friend as I am the saviour who wants you to worship him forever.”

“The demon say’s “Do you view sexual acts between individuals of the same gender to be an abomination?”…“Do you approve,” the demon says, “of marriage between individuals of differing racial backgrounds?”The demon continues without hesitation, asking, “Should the Zionist state of Israel be allowed to exist?”Question after question, I’m stumped. Even fingers crossed. The paradox: Is God a racist, homophobic, anti-semantic ass? Or is God testing to see if I am?”

“Rant goes, "Really, truly with her whole entire heart, does Echo hate somebody?"I go, doesn't Rant mean "love"?And Rant shrugs and says, "Ain't it the same thing?”

“Where I'm at is a big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, sitting in the dark while I try to rescue the doomed bits and pieces of life, in the hope that a mere story can become Noah's Ark and deliver all the living things of the past to a bright and glorious immortality?”

“Regret, Daisy knew, was the only confirmation of a well-lived life. If you didn't occasionally go too far, you weren't going anywhere.”

“That's the worst aspect of being a writer: managing plausibility.”