works-by-chuck-palahniuk

"What do I think I am? In a thousand words....I don't have a clue, but I'll start by abandoning hope. Please help me, Satan. That would make me so happy. Help me give up my addiction to hope."

"Being dead isn't all sitting around in remorseful reflection and bitter self-recrimination. Death, like life, is what you make of it."

"Why is it that I occur as a story to everyone except myself?"

"To prove that I exist I must kill you....If you are, in fact, my continuing author, then killing you will end my existence as well. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living. But if I destroy you and your dreck script, and I still exist....then my existence will be glorious, for I will become my own master."

"If you can watch much television, then being dead will a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead."

"[I]f you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. A child allows us to revisit the excitement we once felt about, well...everything. A generation later, our grandkids bump up our enthusiasm yet again. Reproducing is a kind of booster shot to keep us loving life."

"In Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth."

"I do hereby and forever abandon abandoning all hope. Honestly, I give up on giving up. I'm just not cut out to be some hopeless, disillusioned wretch with no aspirations for the rest of the eternity, sprawled catatonic in my own feces on a cold stone floor. In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple of days of hopelessness. Future scientists would call it Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case of history chasing rainbows."

"No one is discriminated against more than alive people discriminate against the dead. Nobody is as badly marginalized. If the dead are portrayed in popular culture it's as zombies...vampires...ghosts, always something threatening to the living."

"I hope, therefore I am."

"It simply makes sense that I should miss my parents more than they miss me, especially when you consider that they only loved me for thirteen years while I loved them my entire life."

"What makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven."

""A woman eats to feed her pussy." Meaning: Anything we do to excess is in compensation for not getting a minimum amount of sexual gratification....Men overimbibe alcohol because their penises are thirsty."

"Yes, and I know that when a super-sexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smokey eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's the kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive 'let them eat cake' type of chauvinism."

"The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our head says, 'I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew.' Meaning: I may be me - but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU."

"Old habits die hard."

"If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.""

"Like so many experiences you venture into knowing full well that they'll be terrible, in fact the core pleasure resides in their very innate badness,..."

"The truth is you stay in Hell until you forgive yourself."

"No, it's not fair, but what makes life feel like Hell is our expectation that it should last forever. Life is short. Dead is forever. You will find out for yourself soon enough. It won't help the situation for you to get all upset."

""In Hell, it's our attachments to a fixed identity that torture us."0"

"Though it was widely rumored that certain students abused medications designed to treat erectile dysfunction, legal counsel advised that no just cause existed for requiring students to submit urine for drug testing. Legal counsel cautioned that, though some tumescence may result from illegally obtained prescription drugs, the majority of genital arousal was naturally occurring and thus protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act.""

"Each holiday tradition acts as an exercise in cognitive development, a greater challenge for the child. Despite the fact that most parents don't recognize this function, they still practice the exercise. Rant also saw how resolving the illusions is crucial to how the child uses any new skills. A child who is never coached with Santa Claus may never develop an ability to imagine. To him, nothing exists except the literal and tangible. A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or his siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe in anything--tangible or intangible--again. To never trust or wonder. But a child who relinquishes the illusions of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, that child may come away with the most important skill set. That child may recognize the strength of his own imagination and faith. He will embrace the ability to create his own reality. That child becomes his own authority. He determines the nature of his world. His own vision. And by doing so, by the power of his example, he determines the reality of the other two types: those who can't imagine, and those who can't trust.""

"Even Party Crashing can get boring if you can't find another team that's flying the designated flag, but at least it's a communal boredom. Like a family.""

"In my classroom, I tried to impress on the students that reality is a consensus. Objects, from diamonds to bubble gum, only have value because we all agree they do. Laws like speed limits are only laws because most people agree to respect them. ""

"Love is a skill you learn. Like house-training a dog. Maybe a talent you do or do not build up. Like muscle. And if you can't learn yourself to love blood family, then you'll never truly love. Not nobody...If you don't accept your folks for all their worst ways, no stranger can ever measure up.""

"Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged-in and living lives boosted to them from other people. Hand-me-down adventures.""

""By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior. Each of those three traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped-up tests to build a child's faith and imagination. The first test is to believe in a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: To believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money. From a man to an animal to a fairy. From toys to candy to money. Thus, interestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairydom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickels...dimes...and quarters. In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as her or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency." pg 61-62"

"A clear corollary formed between sunny weather and the number of boys suffering from painful penile erections. At issue wasn't the penises, but the failure to occlude them while in their turgid state. Furthermore, the district's legal counsel advised that a dress code requiring constraining, modest, fully binding undergarments would be impossible to enforce and serve the negative purpose of drawing increased attention to the issue. Our chief effort intended to deal with the issue of engorged phalluses obliquely and indirectly. Legal counsel advised no direct condemnation of erections on school property. No district representative was to acknowledge or attempt to mask or resolve any obvious erections.""

"Rant advocating for us, our demands included a therapeutic, all-hours lunchroom, since it's a known impossibility to eat food and maintain a woody. We asked for nothing short of equal recognition for our biological...but the next word stumped us. Should we say "obstacles"?"Handicaps"?"Disabilities"? This last word, we tortured over. We finally settled on the word "burden," asking for "full and equal recognition of the burden inherent in the male anatomy." Hearing how "burden" sounded fine and noble. ""

"Money you don't work to earn, you spend very quickly.""

"The future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday.""

"You can get plenty of folks telling the same lie if they got a stake in it. You get everybody telling the same lie and it ain't a lie, not no more""

"It's compelling that so many cultures practice a meticulous yet transitory art form as a spiritual ritual, prayer, or meditation...Whether it's the Piranski eggs or the sand mandalas of the Tibetan Buddhists, their common theme is to somehow achieve an intense focus and complete absorption of the artist's attention. Despite the fragile nature of the artwork, the process becomes a means of stepping outside the temporal."

"It's spooky to consider, us turning teeth into gold and gold into eyeballs. Things in life is either flesh or money, like they can't be both at the same time. That would be like somebody being both alive and dead. You can't. You got to choose."

"Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic system. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.""

"I've survived, that, the day I finally meet Death, the two of us will be old, long lost friends. Me and Death, separated at birth. Page 198"

"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."

""Everyone wants to feel special - attain a special status among their peers - but not too special. Most kids only want to be special the same way their friends are special."

"You burn out your brain with rabies. Go all theta-trance-y with driving. You hit something and wake up naked in history."

"Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies."

"What if reality is nothing but some disease? Page 215"

"Couldn’t you guess that old time gods and saviors like Jesus and Isis and Shiva are just losers with beater Torinos and Mustangs who went party crashing and found a way to ‘sever their origins’? Maybe they all started as real nobodies, and as their reality faded, a new story piled up around them?"

"Do you ever wish you’d never been born?"

"A sexually conflicted thirteen-year-old rattlesnake venom junkie with rabies. It's safe to say that's every father's worst nightmare.""

"If just one leader would emerge- Rant Casey or anybody- the arms of us, ready to fight and die, wouldn't we be invincible?""

"History is, its just a nightmare. Cut off tongues lying everywhere..""

"To everybody, everybody else is a liar.""

"How folks lay claim to a loved one is they give you a name of their own. They figure to label you as their property.""

"“You grow up to become living proof of your parent's limitations. Their less-than-masterpiece."