Chuck Palaniuk's quotes

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."

"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."


"Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something."

"When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves."

"All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired."

"Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct."

"If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible."

"Find good in what the world says is evil."

"The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly."

"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."

"...beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power."

"The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything. "

"No, whether a woman is a concubine to fuck or a damsel to redeem, she's always just some passive object to fulfill a man's purpose."

"I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means."

"I still love him so much I'll hide any amount of conjugated estrogen in his food. So much I'll do anything to destroy him."

"The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real."

"I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have."

"Oh love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I'll be anybody you want me to be."

"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."

"Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer."

"I'm a toxic waste byproduct of God's creation."

"The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate."

"Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone."

"First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life"

"After a good-looking boy gives you rabies two, three times, you'll settle down and marry somebody less exciting for the rest of your life"

"You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger."

"sometimes your best way to deal with shit is not to hold yourself as such a precious little prize."

"tell the world what scares you most. save the world with some advice from the future."

"Self improvement is masturbation..."

"By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself."

"Fathers. Mothers. With all their caring and attention. They will f--- you up, every time."

"...the girl traced the outline of her lover's shadow so she would always have a record of how he looked..."

"You cannot be the person they know and the great, glorious person you want to become. Not at the same time."

"don't do what you want. do what you don't want. do what you're trained not to want. do the things that scare you most."

"Maybe we should always assume the worst."