Fight Club

50 Fucked-Up Chuck Palahniuk Quotes That Will Make You Re-Evaluate Everything

When you understand that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. 
Heidi Priebe
June 17, 2016
“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
Tagged: Boredom, Life, Excitment
“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
Tagged: Originality, Creativity, Individuality
“I don't want to die without any scars.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Tagged: Life, Living Fully, Scars, Change, Pain
“Find out what you’re afraid of and go live there.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
Tagged: Fear, inspiration, motivation, Embracing Fear
“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
Tagged: ENFP, Reality, Emotion, Ideas, Imagination, Fantasy, Idealism, Change
“Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn’t bother to torture you if she didn’t.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Tagged: Love, Torture, Pain, Relationships
“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Diary
Tagged: Happiness, Pain
“It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Tagged: Loss, Failure, Freedom
“What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Tagged: Love, Obsession, romance, Needing People, Addiction
“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters: A Novel
Tagged: Happiness, Pain, Risk
“You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Tagged: Pain, Love
“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters: A Novel
Tagged: Hate, Self-hatred, Self-Concept
“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?”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters: A Novel
Tagged: Life, Death, Reincarnation
“At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Tagged: Life, Happiness, Destruction
“We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Tagged: ENFP, ENTP, Change, Revolutionary, Self-Direction
“Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Tagged: Fighting Back, Anger, Direction
“All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Tagged: Passion, inspiration, Work, Working Hard
“If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Tagged: Self-Direction, Desire, Passion, Apathy
“Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters: A Novel
Tagged: Chaos, Direction, Making Mistakes, Foolishness
“People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
Tagged: Pain, Holding On, Moving On, Moving Forward, Self-Direction
“In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Rant
Tagged: Imagination, Religion
“That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger Than Fiction
Tagged: Writing, Words, Life, Living, Reflection
“If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.
There is no free will.
There are no variables.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor: A Novel
Tagged: History, Chaos, Understanding, Free Will, Life, Random Chance, Fate, Patterns
“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor: A Novel
Tagged: Life, The Unknown, Uncertainty, Wanting Someone You Can't Have
“Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor: A Novel
Tagged: Happiness, Boredom, Sin, Religion
“Everything before now is just a story I carry around. I guess that would apply to anybody in the world. What I need is a new story about who I am. What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters: A Novel
Tagged: Stories, Self-Concept
“The only thing I know is everything you love will die.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Tagged: Death, Mortality, Life, Love
“People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters: A Novel
Tagged: Past, Future, Lives, Nostalgia
“Give me lust, baby. Give me malice. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
Tagged: Coping Mechanisms, Lust
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Tagged: Advertising, Happiness, Consumerism, Capitalism