Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home... it's your responsibility to love it, or change it.
AUTHOR QUOTES
Quotes by Chuck Palahniuk
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Chuck Palahniuk. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
EXPLORE BY TOPIC
Selected quotes by Chuck Palahniuk
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
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.
If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can.
The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.
Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
I think in a way, you're doomed, once you can envision something. You're sort of doomed to make it happen. I've found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that's usually the moment that the relationship starts to fall apart.
You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.
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?
In 2008, while the film version of my book 'Choke' was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother - the plot of Choke - while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.
If nothing else, there's comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.
Arguing that God doesn't exist would be like people in the 10th century arguing that germs and microbes didn't exist because they couldn't see them.
I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.
If you flee from the things you fear, there's no resolution.
People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.
For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.
Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.
Men are destroyed for being rebellious, and women destroy themselves by failing to be rebellious. Unless you can make that next jump to either getting along with people or resisting people, you are ultimately destroying yourself.
More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.
More quotes attributed to Chuck Palahniuk are available across the Mayalines library.
Related author collections
Explore authors represented in the same topics.