Chuck Palahniuk: life quotes

You wake up, and that's enough.

Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a hundred years from now?

Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value. Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melodramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away.

"We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact," Tyler said. "So don't fuck with us."

The air will always be too filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.

To me, Oyster says, The only power of life and death you have is every time you order a hamburger at McDonald's.

Somebody saves your life, and they'll love you forever.

IF YOU'RE GOING TO READ THIS, DON'T BOTHER.
After a couple pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece.
Save yourself.
There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair.
You're not getting any younger.
What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse.

"I just want you to be happy."

That's easy, I say, just put a "happy" spell on me.

And Helen says, "There's no such spell." She says, "They have drugs for that."

The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of the audience.

What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to be wrong?

According to Plato, we don’t learn anything. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything. Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know. Our misery. This suppression of our rational mind is the source of inspiration. The muse. Our guardian angel. Suffering takes us out of our rational self-control and lets the divine channel through us.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are.
Letting our past decide our future.
Or we can decide for ourselves.

"When you're twenty-four," Marla says, "you have no idea how far you can really fall, but I was a fast learner."

“The same mistakes we made as cavemen,” says Mr. Whittier, “we still make.” So maybe we’re supposed to fight and hate and torture each other...

"The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight."
Caged inside too many laws.
By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn't real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because its 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.