Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk

For official record, announce instructor, the state requires no epic hero. No strive achieve personal celebrity of spotlight and applause. Lectures instructor, the state desires best ideal perform as mediocre. No gain attention showboat. No buffoon. Best effort so occur average. Suppress climbing ego. Become ordinary. Invisible.

Nothing feels as awful as pouring your heart out to some talk therapist, then realizing this so-called professional is actually vastly stupid and you've just professed your most secret secrets to some goon who's wearing one brown sock and one blue sock.

Scratching Yogi's ears Michelle says 'That's just part of his job, the comforting. That's what I mean by the bhatisvata. That he's more concerned with comforting and helping, even more than his own well-being. This is a trait that more people should encompass.

There will be mistakes, and maybe the point is not to forget the rest of yourself if one little part might go bad.

We thought all this teach­ing was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid.

We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.

Parents, they'll screw you up every time.

If you're male, and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And sometimes you find your father in your career.

When you ate her tuna casserole, you didn't talk or flip through a National Geographic. Your eyes and ears stayed inside your mouth. Your whole world kept inside your mouth, feeling and careful for the little balled-up tinfoils Irene Casey would hide in the tuna parts. A side effect of eating slow was, you naturally, genuinely tasted, and the food tasted better. Could be other ladies were better cooks, but you'd never notice.

The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

I want to tell them, stay in the cage. There are bet­ter things than free­dom. There are worse things than liv­ing a long bored life in some stranger's house and then dy­ing and go­ing to ca­nary heav­en.

The same as if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, you realize, if no one had been there to witness the agony of Christ, would we be saved? The key to salvation is how much attention you get. How high a profile you get. Your audience share. Your exposure. Your name recognition. Your press following. The buzz.

Unless we have that moment of chaos, followed by the emotional release of realization, nothing will be remembered.

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

The most I can ever do is write things down. To remember them. The details. To honor them in some way.

There is no human soul, and I am absolutely for sure seriously not going to fucking cry.

It's a Cinderella story, only at midnight she turns back into a fugitive.

The sixth rule of Fight Club: No shirt, no shoes.

Rip yourself open. Tell me my life story before I die. Sew yourself shut.

Civilization is a condition which unsocial misfits impose on the rest of popular, easygoing, family-oriented humanity. Only the miserable, the failures, the outcasts will crouch for days to observe the mating habits of a salamander.

The truth doesn't glitter and shine.

I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong, again.

That's the worst aspect of being a writer: managing plausibility.

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.