Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk

Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.

It can only take a moment to waste the rest of your life.

What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.

When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

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.

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

I am an invisible monster, and I am incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse.

For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.

Maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.

Everyone's in their own personal coma.

We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. 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.

Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken!

Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.

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

With insomnia, you're never really awake; but you're never really asleep.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I feel peaceful. Not happy. Not sad. Not anxious. Not horny. Just all the higher parts of my brain closing up shop. The cerebral cortex. The cerebellum. That's where my problem is. I'm now simplifying myself. Somewhere balanced in the perfect middle between happiness and sadness. Because sponges never have a bad day.

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.

Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.

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

The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is, you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this.

You gain power by pretending to be weak.

Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn't bother to torture you if she didn't.