Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape - all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain.

People are constantly not feeling, but numbing themselves, either through medication or playing on their phones. If you start feeling bad, it's like, 'Distract! Distract! Put on Storage Wars!' And I know because I'm guilty of it, too.

I think we live in a time where we can all distract ourselves from facing the pain or the reality of all of our lives - tons of ways to hide, to kill pain, to deal with pain.

Our vices are attempts to combine self-medication and enjoyment.

That's maybe the reason he does so many things so that he will not have to think .

Most people cant' deal with reality, but indulge heavily in fantasy and fear.

Exactly! We run or we lose ourselves in something, somebody, anything to try and ease our pain.

Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.

When I ask Plutarch about his absence, he just shakes his head and says, "He couldnt face it." "Haymitch? Not able to face something? Wanted a day off, more likely," I say. "I think his actual words were 'I couldn't face it without a bottle,'" says Plutarch.

You can see desperation in people who are too eager to laugh because they're in such a hurry not to look at what's confronting them in their lives and that's kind of sad because there's a kind of pornographic aspect to it, of making some sort of pain go away, of hovering around a pain, making yourself numb, not feel anything.

'Crazy-busy' is a great armor, it's a great way for numbing. What a lot of us do is that we stay so busy, and so out in front of our life, that the truth of how we're feeling and what we really need can't catch up with us.

I'm a classic stress-eater, so I know a lot about how eating can become a way of hiding from what's really wrong. I escape into food. But some people escape into books. Some into relationships that might not be good for them. The three main characters in 'The Sugar Queen' struggle with each of these comforts-turned-crutches.

We spend more time developing means of escaping our troubles than we do solving the troubles we're trying to escape from.

People don't really want to know what happens. They ask you for just a second, but then they don't want to know.

Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye, and deny it.

Reality is just a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

A sensitive person is seldom happy with the world the way it is. And since you cannot change it, you think, 'Might as well numb the anguish.' If you're using something to escape reality, then it's something you need to address.

We live in a society running from pain through alcohol, through too much exercise, through sugar, through drugs - as opposed to realizing that these things come up because they are lessons. It's a way to wake you up.

We are a culture of people who've bought into the idea that if we stay busy enough, the truth of our lives won't catch up with us.

Reality is for people who can't face drugs.

If you run away from trouble, it always follows.

I was poisoning myself with alcohol and medicating myself. I was trying to numb things. I was trying not to feel things, and that's ridiculous. It's one of the dumbest things you can do, because all you're doing is postponing the inevitable. Someday you'll have to look all those things in the eye rather than try to numb the pain.

The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.

The masses think that is is easy to flee from reality, when it is the most difficult thing in the world.

Because after you've crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them. And there's no escaping from constant escape. Distracting ourselves. Avoiding confrontation. Getting past the moment. Jacking off. Television. Denial.