Elizabeth > Elizabeth's Quotes

“Could you hold the chainsaw a bit closer to your mouth, please?”
― Chuck Palahniuk , Invisible Monsters

“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead.
You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight. Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“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.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“The damaged loves the damaged.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Snuff

“You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Reject the basic assumptions of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“We all have this moment, when your folks first see you as someone not growing up to be them.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.
This only looks like love.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“If we can forgive what has been done to us . . .

If we can forgive what we've done to others . . .

If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being
villians or victims.

Only then can we maybe rescue the world.

But we still sit here, waiting to be saved. While we're
still victims, hoping to be discovered while we suffer.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“As young people we want something to slow us down and keep us trapped in one place long enough to look below the surface of the world. That disaster is a car crash or a war. To make us sit still. It can be getting cancer or getting pregnant. The important part is how it seems to catch us by surprise. That disaster stops us from living the life we'd planned as children - a life of constant dashing around.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“One minute was enough, Tyler said, "A person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I'm not sure what we're running from. Nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up. Getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if running we won't have to get on with our lives.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger than Fiction

“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.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Most people would never admit it, but they'd been bitching since they were born. As soon as their head popped out into that bright delivery-room light, nothing had been right. Nothing had been as comfortable or felt so good. Just the effort it took to keep your stupid physical body alive, just finding food and cooking it and dishwashing, the keeping warm and bathing and sleeping, the walking and bowel movements and ingrown hairs, it was all getting to be too much work.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“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. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke