Chuck Palahniuk

“No me habían follado así desde la escuela primaria.”

“Quería destrozar algo hermoso.”

“¿Qué es peor, el infierno o la nada? Quema los museos, límpiate el culo con la Mona Lisa, para que al menos Dios aprenda tu nombre.”

“Sentía ganas de meterle una bala entre los ojos a cualquier panda que se negara a follar para salvar su especie. Quería abrir las válvulas de descarga rápida de todos los petroleros y cubrir de crudo todas esas magnificas playas que yo jamás conocería. Quería respirar humo.”

“Tienes que saber, no temer, saber que algún día vas a morir, y hasta que no entiendas eso, eres inútil.”

“Perseguís a la gente de quien dependéis, preparamos vuestras comidas, recogemos vuestras basuras, conectamos vuestras llamadas, conducimos vuestras ambuláncias, y os protegemos mientras dormís, así que no te metas con nosotros.”

“Cuando la gente cree que te estás muriendo es cuando en verdad te escuchan, en lugar de estar esperando su turno para hablar”

“—Protagonista: Por favor, doctor. Estoy sufriendo.—Doctor: ¿Quieres ver sufrimiento? Visita el pabellón de cáncer testicular. Eso es dolor.”

“Únicamente cuando se pierde todo somos libres para actuar.”

“Lo que posees acabará poseyéndote.”

“All object printed: Love me. Look me. Million speaking objects,begging. Crown American consumer with power of king, to rescue choose and give home or abandon here for expire.”

“Echo Lawrence(Party Crasher): If you were going to carve a quote on his grave, his favourite saying was 'The future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday.' Shot Dunyun(Party Crasher): That's bullshit. Rant's favourite saying was 'Some people are just born human. The rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there.”

“More and more, for the stupid little kid, that was the idea . . .That if enough people looked at you, you’d never need anybody’s attention ever again.That if someday you were caught, exposed, and revealed enough, then you’d never be able to hide again. There’d be no difference between your public and your private lives.That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you’d never want to own or do another thing.That if you could eat or sleep enough, you’d never need more.That if enough people loved you, you’d stop needing love.That you could ever be smart enough.That you could someday get enough sex.These all became the little boy’s new goals. The illusions he’d have for the rest of his life. These were all the promises he saw in the fat man’s smile”

“The closest thing that comes to how the day felt is when you wipe back to front. You're on the toilet. You're not thinking, and you smear shit on the back of your hanging-down wrinkled ball skin. The more you try to wipe it clean, the skin stretches and the mess keeps getting bigger. The thin layer of shit spreads into the hair and down your thighs. That's how a day like this, how it feels to keep secret.”

“The reason boys desire so desperately to kiss girls is because, with each kiss, the activity makes the boy’s wanger grow larger. The more girls a boy can kiss, the larger a wanger he’ll eventually possess, and the boys boasting the largest are awarded the best-paying, highest-status jobs. Really, it’s all very simple.”

“There's nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics.”

“As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.”

“Everybody looks a little crazy if you're looking close enough and if you can't look that close, then you don't really love them.”

“The way she looks right now, you have to think about multiple car pile-ups. Imagine two bloodmobiles colliding head on. The way she looks, you'd have to think of mass graves to even log thirty seconds in the saddle. Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs. That's how beautiful she looks.”

“Ignore how it feels when the only real talent you have is for hiding the truth.”

“Nobody lay awake at night wondering if the wheat they'd raised was truly happy and fulfilled being made into bread.”

“There's the obituary to look for the next week, six column inches about nothing that really mattered”

“With all of the seats empty, you could pretend everyone's just gone to the bathroom.”

“Love is a skill you learn.”

“The worst job in the whole world must be recycling toilet paper.”

“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.”

“Now is the autumn of our ennui.”

“Give me romance.Flash.Give me denial.”

“Please know that there are much better things in life than being lonely or liked or bitter or mean or self conscious. We are all full of shit. Go love someone just because, I know your heart may be badly bruised, or even the victim of numerous knifings but it will always heal even if you don’t want it to, it keeps going. There are the most fantastic, beautiful things and people out there, I promise. It’s up to you to find them.”

“It's eerie, but what's happening is the folks are staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor, on and on, completely trapped in a reality loop that never ends.”

“I try to get centered:Watching white moon faceThe stars never feel angerBlah, blah, blah, the end”

“MY BOSS SENDS me home because of all the dried blood on my pants, and I am overjoyed. The hole punched through my cheek doesn’t ever heal. I’m going to work, and my punched-out eye sockets are two swollen-up black bagels around the little piss holes I have left to see through. 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. Worker bees can leave Even drones can fly away The queen is their slaveYou give up all your worldly possessions and your car and go live in a rented house in the toxic waste part of town where late at night, you can hear Marla and Tyler in his room, calling each other hum; butt wipe. Take it, human butt wipe. Do it, butt wipe. Choke it down. Keep it down, baby. Just by contrast, this makes me the calm little center of the world. Me, with my punched-out eyes and dried blood in big black crusty stains on my pants, I’m saying HELLO to everybody at work. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it’s so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me. Sigh. Look. Outside the window. A bird. My boss asked if the blood was my blood. The bird flies downwind. I’m writing a little haiku in my head. Without just one nest A bird can call the world home Life is your career I’m counting on my fingers: five, seven, five. The blood, is it mine? Yeah, I say. Some of it. This is a wrong answer.”

“Walter from Microsoft catches my eye. Here's a young guy with perfect teeth and clear skin and the kind of job you bother to write the alumni magazine about getting. You know he was too young to fight in any wars, and if his parents weren't divorced, his father was never home, and here he's looking at me with half my face clean shaved and half a leering bruise hidden in the dark. Blood shining on my lips. And maybe Walter's thinking about a meatless, pain-free potluck he went to last weekend or the ozone or the Earth's desperate need to stop cruel product testing on animals, but probably he's not.”

“My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what?My dad didn't know.When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married.I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need.”

“A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many things," the doorman said.”

“It took my whole life to buy this stuff.”

“We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper. Mine are confetti.”

“Everything, including your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal people of wherever, well, these dishes all get blown out by the blast. Picture floor-to-ceiling drapes blown out and flaming to shreds in the hot wind.”

“When you travel a lot, you learn to pack the same for every trip. Six white shirts, two black trousers. The bare minimum you need to survive.”

“It turns out, my suitcase was vibrating on departure from Dulles, according to the security task force guy, so the police took it off the flight. Everything was in that bag. My contact lens stuff. One red tie with blue strips. One blue tie with red stripes. These are regimental stripes, not club tie stripes. And one solid red tie.”

“Marla doesn't have testicular cancer. Marla doesn't have tuberculosis. She isn't dying. Okay in that brain brain-food philosophy way, we're all dying, but Marla isn't dying the way Chloe was dying.”

“How I met Tyler was I went to a nude beach. This was the very end of summer, and I was asleep. Tyler was naked and sweating, gritty with sand, his hair wet and stringy, hanging in his face.Tyler had been around before we met.Tyler was pulling driftwood logs out of the surf and dragging them up the beach. In the wet sand, he’d already planted a half circle of logs so they stood a few inches apart and as tall as his eyes. There were four logs, and when I woke up, I watched Tyler pull a fifth log up the beach. Tyler dug a hole under one end of the log, then lifted the other end until the log slid into the hole and stood there at a slight angle.You wake up at the beach.We were the only people on the beach.With a stick, Tyler drew a straight line in the sand several feet away. Tyler went back to straighten the log by stamping sand around its base.I was the only person watching this.Tyler called over, “Do you know what time it is?”I always wear a watch,“Do you know what time it is?”I asked, where?“Right here,” Tyler said. “Right now.” It was 4:06 P.M.After a while, Tyler sat cross-legged in the shadow of the standing logs. Tyler sat for a few minutes, got up and took a swim, pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and started to leave. I had to ask.I had to know what Tyler was doing while I was asleep.If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?I asked if Tyler was an artist.Tyler shrugged and showed me how the five standing logs were wider at the base. Tyler showed me the line he’d drawn in the sand, and how he’d used the line to gauge the shadow cast by each log. Sometimes, you wake up and have to ask where you are. What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. Only now the fingers were Nosferatu-long and the thumb was too short, but he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he’d created himself.You wake up, and you’re nowhere.One minute was enough Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.You wake up, and that’s enough”

“I melt and swell at the moment of landing when one wheel thuds on the runway but the plane leans to one side and hangs in the decision to right itself or roll. For this moment, nothing matters. Look up into the stars and you’re gone. Not your luggage. Nothing matters. Not your bad breath. The windows are dark outside and the turbine engines roar backward. The cabin hangs at the wrong angle under the roar of the turbines, and you will never have to file another expense account claim. Receipt required for items over twenty-five dollars. You will never have to get another haircut. A thud, and the second wheel hits the tarmac. The staccato of a hundred seat-belt buckles snapping open, and the single-use friend you almost died sitting next to says: I hope you make your connection. Yeah, me too. And this is how long your moment lasted. And life goes on.”

“Wherever I'm going, I'll be there to apply the formula. I'll keep the secret intact.It's simple arithmetic.It's a story problem.If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall?You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiple it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don't initiate a recall.If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.”

“This is a terrible way to travel. I go to meetings my boss doesn't want to attend. I take notes. I'll get back to you.”

“At home, you'll sometimes wake up in your dark bed with the terror you've fallen asleep in the booth and missed a changeover.”

“Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip. I prayed for wind shear effect. I prayed for pelicans sucked into the turbines and loose bolts and ice on the wings. On takeoff, as the plane pushed down the runway and the flaps tilted up, with our seats in their full upright position and our tray tables stowed and all personal carry-on baggage in the overhead compartment, as the end of the runway ran up to meet us with our smoking materials extinguished, I prayed for a crash.”

“Every takeoff and landing, when the plane banked too much to one side, I prayed for a crash.”

“At almost every meeting since then, Big Bob has made me cry. I never went back to the doctor. I never chewed the valerian root.This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. If I didn't say anything, people in a group assumed the worst. They cried harder, I cried harder. Look up into the stars and you're gone.Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I'd ever felt. I wasn't host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around.”

“This is better than real life.”