Chuck Palahniuk

“Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.”

“Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.”

“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.”

“This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.”

“Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.”

“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.”

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”

“Ignorance was bliss.”

“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.”

“Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people's defenses.”

“Your life isn't about doing one perfect 'thing' and then falling down dead. It's more like going to church or writing a book. You do it over and over, always trying to be a little bit better. Then you die.”

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

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”

“they all think men are obsolete. useless. as if we're just some sexual appendix.”

“We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.”

“If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?”

“The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.”

“Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong.”

“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”

“No, whether a woman is a concubine to fuck or a damsel to redeem, she's always just some passive object to fulfill a man's purpose.”