Quotes by Chuck Palahniuk

And the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.

Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, Im wondering how clean this gun is.

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.

I asked if Tyler was an artist. Tyler shrugged...What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. . . he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler sat in the palm of a perfection hed created himself. 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.

your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. its all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.

Death is a long process, Archer says. Your body is just the first part of you that croaks. Meaning: Beyond that, your dreams have to die. Then your expectations. And your anger about investing a lifetime in learning shit and loving people and earning money, only to have all that crap come to basically nothing. Really, your physical body dying is the easy part. Beyond that, your memories must die. And your ego. Your pride and shame and ambition and hope, all that Personal Identity Crap can take centuries to expire.

My stomach hurts, but if its guilt or impacted stool, I cant tell. Either way, Im so full of shit.

I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. Hes taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.

In a way, being an addict is very proactive. A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death. There is such a thing as planning your getaway.

People dont 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.

Every garden looks beautiful in May. Meaning: Everyone is somewhat attractive when shes young.

My secret wish is right now to be romancing this dead girl. A dead girl. Any dead girl. Im not what youd call choosy.

You realize that people take drugs because its the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. Its only in drugs or death well see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

You young people, you who think you invented fun and drugs, fuck you

Scratching Yogis ears Michelle says Thats just part of his job, the comforting. Thats what I mean by the bhatisvata. That hes more concerned with comforting and helping, even more than his own well-being. This is a trait that more people should encompass.

Theyd told him he had talent. That word was heroin to the young. Talent

Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle,” Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside. This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don’t. And every year it burns, there’s more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve. Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year. The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What’s left of them...“When you think about it from a native plant perspective,” Oyster says, “Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist.” Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox.

His saliva tasted like the wet dicks of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.

Everybody looks a little crazy if youre looking close enough and if you cant look that close, then you dont really love them.

Give me lust, baby.Flash.Give me malice.Flash.Give me detached existentialist ennui.Flash.Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.Flash.