30 Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk that will Open Your Mind

Before Fight Club was a mainstream movie success, it was an amazing, life-changing, awe-inspiring book. Discovering the true identity of Tyler Durden was one of those moments that I remember exactly where I was, just like I remember exactly where I was on September 11th, 2001. Fight Club was only an dip into the twisted, swirling pool that is a Palahniuk novel for me and if you are a reader, I recommend reading Invisible Monsters, Survivor, and Choke.

These are 30 of my favourite quips and quotes from those books, and I hope that they open your mind as much as they have opened mine.

“The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.”

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

“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.”

“You will always have some excuse not to live your life.”

“No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention.”

“At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”

“When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.”

“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.”

“All the effort in the world won’t matter if you’re not inspired.”

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”

“If we can forgive what’s 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 villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.”

“Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.”

“I don’t want to die without a few scars.”

“That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can’t control life, at least you can control your version.”

“We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”

“Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct.”

“It’s funny how you never think about the women you’ve had. It’s always the ones who get away that you can’t forget.”

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

“We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are … Or we can decide for ourselves.”

“Your past is just a story. and once you realize this it has no power over you.”

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”

“The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don’t be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.”

“Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.”

“You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you.”

“Nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.”

“Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won’t get any better.”

“People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.”

“Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life.”

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”

“Find out what you’re afraid of and go live there.”