Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

I just think that sometimes we hang onto people or relationships long after they've ceased to be of any use to either of you.

As I get older, my perspective changes, and I just see how relationships aren't always what they appear to be. It's one of those sad but true things. We can see sometimes when people are becoming distant in all the things that create breaking apart, as painful as it is, and at the same time, still appreciating that person.

I have always been interested in how strange it is, when you date someone and break up, and then you both move on and continue your lives. What do you owe them, if anything, for that time intimate time spent together? What does that time mean, if anything?

If that person doesn't want to be in your life, just let him or her leave.

I would stay away from him and leave him to go his own road where there would be other women, countless other women, who would probably give him as much physical pleasure as he had had with me. I wouldn’t care, or at least I told myself that I wouldn’t care, because none of them would ever own him—own any larger piece of him than I now did.

To be honest, I'm not that good at staying friends. I like to move on after a relationship ends. If I break up with somebody, I don't want to see her or hear from her.

Today I will stop trying to control my relationships. I will participate at a reasonable level and let the other person do the same. I can let go, knowing that the relationship will find its own life-or not-and that I don't have to do all the work, only my share.

Alice: It's the only way to leave. "I don't love you anymore. Goodbye." Dan: Supposing you do still love them? Alice: You don't leave.

Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

How is it possible that a boyfriend ceases to exist from one day to another?

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away.

And I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart slowly, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and nothing but herself and her mom in those last moments as she spent as a person.

In college, I had a course in Latin, and one day the word "divorce" came up. I always figured it came from some root that meant "divide." In truth, it comes from "divertere," which means "to divert." I believe that. All divorce does is divert you, taking you away from everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you wanted and steering you into all kinds of other stuff, like discussions about your mother's girdle and whether she should marry someone else.

I thought I knew who you were, but I see now you were a lesson to learn, and all I am to you now is a bridge that’s been burned.

I told Terry I was leaving. She had been thinking about it all night and was resigned to it. Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.

A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.

Vade Mecum I want the scissors to be sharp and the table perfectly level when you cut me out of my life and paste me in that book you always carry.

The reason it's so painful when someone disappears is you have to face the fact that the person you loved had probably left you a long time before he grabbed his coat and scrammed.

Take your records, take you freedom, take your memories, I dont need 'em. And take your cat, and leave my sweater, cause we've got nothing left to weather.

If you're going to break up, it reaches a point where whatever is happening is not working and it all comes to a head. I think that's a tough realization and it's hard to communicate sometimes. You just have to think about your happiness and the other person's happiness, and communicate really honestly.

Vladimir: Did I ever leave you? Estragon: You let me go.

Despite what I feel for Peeta, this is when I accept deep down that he'll never come back to me. Or i'll never go back to him. I'll die for my trouble. And he'll die insane and hating me.

He'd stopped trying to bring her back. She only came back when she felt like it anyway, in dreams and lies and broken-down deja-vu.