Chuck Palahniuk

“Inside the hole, the red lips say, ”we all grew up with the same television shows. It’s like we all have the same artificial memory implants. We remember almost none of our real childhoods, but we remember everything that happened to sitcom families. We have the same basic goals. We all have the same fears.” The lips say, ”The future is not bright.”

“My hips bristle with totems and talismans, proof that I am not simply a character in a fixed book or film. I am no single narrative. As neither Rebecca de Winter nor Jane Eyre, I am free to revise my story, to reinvent myself, my world, at any given moment.”

“Nevertheless, if you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. A child allows us to revisit the excitement we once felt about, well... everything. A generation later, our grandkids bump up our enthusiasm yet again. Reproducing is a kind of booster shot to keep us loving life.”

“They're just words is all. Powerless. Vocabulary. Dialogue.”

“I want you to know I won't always be here,' Fertility says, 'but I'll always find you.”

“If you ask me, people in hell just scream to hear their own voice and to pass time.”

“A house full of condiments and no real food. If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.”

“Or, I could just sit in the bushes and pump the hand pumpuntil the plumbing was superpressurized to 110 psi. This way, whensomeone goes to flush a toilet, the toilet tank will explode. At 150 psi, ifsomeone turns on the shower, the water pressure will blow off the showerhead, strip the threads, blam, the shower head turns into a mortar shell.Tyler only says this to make me feel better. The truth is I like my boss.Besides, I'm enlightened now. You know, only Buddha-style behavior.”

“Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything.”

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

“Be famous. Be a big social experiment in getting what you don't want. Find value in what we've been taught is worthless. Find good in what the world says is evil. I'm giving you my life because I want the whole world to know you. I wish the whole world would embrace what it hates. Find what you're afraid of most and go live there.”

“This is all my identification, my birth certificate, my everything. You can be Shannon McFarland from now on. My career. The ninety-degree attention. It's yours. All of it. Everything. I hope it's enough for you. It's everything I have left.”

“Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.”

“That's what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can't know I'm its mother. It's so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that's what I love about fire.”

“Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, I'll be anybody you want me to be. Use me. Change me. I can be thin with big breasts and big hair. Take me apart. Make me into anything, but just love me.”

“I'm not straight, and I'm not gay. I'm not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.”

“Years of living in the hope that what you'll get will be better than what you have. Years of looking and feeling worse in the hope that you might look better.”

“Driving east, I'm not sure what we're running from. Evie or the police of Mr. Baxter or the Rhea sisters. Or nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up, getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if by running we won't have to get on with our lives.”

“She named me Daisy St. Patience and never wanted to know what name I walked in the door with.”

“All these thousands of miles later, all these different people I've been, and it's still the same story. Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying? How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?”

“In the way our world is, everybody shoulder to shoulder, people knowing everything about you at first glance, a good veil is your tinted limousine window. The unlisted number for your face. Behind a good veil, you could be anyone.”

“You can't kiss someone who has no lips. Oh love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I'll be anybody you want me to be.”

“You can say anything if enough people will listen.”

“Brandy is so attractive you could chop her head off and put it on blue velvet in the window at Tiffany's and somebody would buy it for a million dollars.”

“We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.”

“It happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated.”

“Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.”

“What Tyler says about the crap and the slaves of history, that's how I felt. I wanted to destroy something beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground”

“Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother.”

“Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I'm wondering how clean this gun is.”

“Just for the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.”

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

“Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born?”

“If no sing, all youth condemned into poverty. Denied possible advancement and self-realization”

“«Il motivo principale per cui la gente se ne va dai paesini di provincia» diceva sempre Rant, «è perché così poi può sognare di tornarci. E il motivo per cui ci resta è per sognare di andarsene». Con questo Rant voleva dire che nessuno è felice, da nessuna parte”

“Certi nascono umani. Altri ci mettono una vita a diventarlo.”

“Quand'è che il futuro è passato da essere una promessa a essere una minaccia?”

“Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.”

“Life is short, death is forever”

“There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.”

“A moment it the most you can ever expect from perfection”

“Sticks and stones may break your bones, but watch out for those damn words.”

“The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.”

“She set them up on a date with their subconscious 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.”

“Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs. That's how beautiful she looks.”

“When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you'd never stare long enough to get if they'd even just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge.”

“Her voice makes me think of her mouth makes me think of her breath makes me think of her breasts.”

“...and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”

“I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things.Only end them.”

“On a large enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.”