Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.

Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.

Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

Man was made to be immortal; else, he could not survive being the fool he is.

And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown it that the ancients did not know everything.

Stupidity isn't punishable by death. If it was, there would be a hell of a population drop.

Those who don't heed the warnings don't live to admit they were stupid not to do so.

All our yesterdays, it is true, have only lighted fools the way to dusty death. But we need at least the dates of the yesterdays and the list of the fools.

when your time came, it came, and that was that. You might say something smart on your way out, but you might just as easily say something stupid.

May posterity show mercy when it look back upon the work we do today. We did what we could with what we had.

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

Nobody lives forever, but we all shine on.

I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.

Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this.

I think somehow I got a sense of the foolishness of the human - my favorite phrase, the foolishness of the human condition.

Life is a sheet of paper white / Whereon each one of us may write / His word or two, and then comes night.

Let us do the work that is before us, so that when our time here is over we will all watch the sun go down as we all must, and say truly, we have prepared our children for the dawn.

Death, thou shalt die.

I thought, If I'm an ancestor and grandmother when I'm twenty-five, I should go peacefully to the real time when I'm an ancestor and a grandmother.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note, when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat. Leaning her breast upon the reedy shore, thus sang her first and last, and sang no more: 'Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.'

The day I leave the power, inside my pockets will only be dust.