My 50 Favorite Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

1. By the time you read this, you’ll be older than you remember.

2. All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never get boring. 

3. The one you love and the one who loves you are never the same person.

4. We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will

5. I don’t want to die without any scars. 

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

7.If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character…Would you slow down? Or speed up?

8. Do the things that scare you the most.

9. We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create

10. You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth.

11. More and more, it feels like I’m doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

12. If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

13. Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

14. Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct

15. Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.

16. The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same future you had, yesterday.

17. That’s the best revenge of all: happiness.  Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life.

18. When you think about it, Johnny Appleseed was a fucking ecological terrorist

19. You grow up to become living proof of your parents’ limitations. Their less-than masterpiece.

20. Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I over stress this fact. Let’s say you’re southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheet metal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you’re sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you—do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?

21. Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.

22. Maybe you don’t go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don’t do

23. What if reality is nothing but some disease. 

24. Anything you can acquire is only another thing you’ll lose.

25. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead. 

26. Sorry, mom. Sorry, God.

27. The big reason why folks leave a small town,’ Rant used to say, ‘is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.

28. That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.

29.After a good-looking boy gives you rabies two, three times, you’ll settle down and marry somebody less exciting for the rest of your life

30. 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

31. After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.

32. My life might be little and boring, but at least it’s mine - not some assembly-line, secondhand, hand-me-down life.

33. “Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.

34. Sticking feathers in your butt does not make you a chicken. 

35.  May I never be complete.  

       May I never be content. 

       May I never be perfect.

36. Which is worse, hell or nothing? 

37. Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit. I am a rock. A jerk. An uncaring ass hole and proud of it. 

38. Maybe this is a love story, maybe it’s not. It just depends on how much I can believe myself. 

39. On game shows some people will take the the trip to France, but most will take the washer dryer set. 

40. History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.

41. Life’s greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.

42. History is, its just a nightmare. Cut off tongues lying everywhere…

43. To everybody, everybody else is a liar.

44. The only person we’ll hate more than each other is ourselves.

45. Hysteria is impossible without an audience.

46. You’re a different human being to everybody you meet.

47. No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

48. I’ve been choking to death for years. By now this should be easy.

49. Where every day doesn’t start with an alarm clock and end with the television.

50. A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.