Chuck Palahniuk on Life

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

"No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way."

"After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting."

"You had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved."

"You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm."

"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."

"What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven."

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

"Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away."

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

"You are permanent, but this life is not," Mr. Whittier would say. "You don't expect to visit an amusement park, then stay forever."

"For the rest of history, all over the world, people will be trying to save this same dead woman. This woman who just wanted to die."

"Either an ancient cursed Egyptian mummy has come back to life and is trying to kill the people next door, or they're watching a movie."

"The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch."

"This is your life and its ending one moment at a time."

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

"The more people die, the more things stay the same."

"Still, he deserved to die. He called me an asshole."

"That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell."

"Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy if you waste their gift sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport."

"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."

"It can only take a moment to waste the rest of your life."

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

"The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors." p144"

"Doctor Sarah didn't start out by attacking and berating everybody who called her radio show," Mona says. "She used to have a little time slot and a little audience, and she seemed to really care about helping people."

"The masochist bullies the sadist into action. The most passive person is actually an aggressor. Every day, just you living means the misery and death of plants and animals- and even some people. "Slaughterhouses, factory farms, sweatshops," she says, "like it or not, that's what your money buys."

"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.Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.This is all practice."

"The way you can go to Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there's a McDonald's hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life-forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water hyacinths. Starlings. Burger Kings. The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out.. He says, "We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time."

"Why have I sold out? You think I'm supposed to grow old, beating some trite old protest drum that people don't hear anymore? Please; protest is now just a backdrop for a Diesel clothing ad in a slick fashion magazine. My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way. It's time — for me, at least — to be clever and seduce people by entertaining them. I'll never be heard if I'm always ranting and griping."

"Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I'm sick and tired of it.How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages....The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and the tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished."