Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Since we cannot match it let us take our revenge by abusing it.

I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.

Today, the tide has turned, we are destroying them.

Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.

When I was younger, I wasn't making it, and I was mad at everybody who was.

I've given up trying to reason with people who despise me.

Too much of nothing, it just makes a fellow mean.

When life gives you lemons. . . You might as well shove 'em where the sun don't shine, because you sure as hell aren't ever going to see any lemonade.

I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting -- the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun.

I think it was a realization of this cancer, an understanding of the broader implications of what cancer is. The greed, the ravaging of lands and seas for profit, the taking of things that don't belong to us; what we've done to the environment in this fast-paced, careless hunger. I think all of that was happening in my body.

They're still building and testing / But what can we do / Condemning the seas and the land and the trees to a tomb

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.

Though this new forest grew mightily, elsewhere the mighty jungles fell. Elsewhere the coastal rain forests that furred the body of the world were torn and riven. Elsewhere the last of the old growth the last of the world's own garment were ripped away. It was in this time, now, that the mother of us all was stripped naked and left to die in shame of her children, she who had been robed in glory like this, adorned like this. I bent my head upon the roots and wept, sorrowing for the trees.

There were moments when I hated everybody I came across, innocent or guilty, and looked at them as thieves who were robbing me of my life with impunity. The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself - but you just can't help it.

Oh, I don't object, of course, to cutting wood from necessity, but why destroy the forests? The woods of Russia are trembling under the blows of the axe. Millions of trees have perished. The homes of the wild animals and birds have been desolated; the rivers are shrinking, and many beautiful landscapes are gone forever. And why? Because men are too lazy and stupid to stoop down and pick up their fuel from the ground.

But they always just laugh off everything I say, when really I want absolutely nothing more than to destroy the world they live in and to watch them suffer, alone and miserable, trying to live in my world for a change!

Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being helpless prey to impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, drops him, promises and betrays, and -crowning injury- inflicts on him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.

Suddenly I've had enough of all this. I've had enough of being made to feel insecure and paranoid and wondering what's going on

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

I hate this, I want this to stop, how are we supposed to live with this, and how am I supposed to walk away? You’re real and I hate you for it.

Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?

Dave hung up. And unplugged the phone. With a fierce and bitter pain he stared at it, watching how, over and over again, it didn't ring.

Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.

We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?

That night it felt that somehow by flicking them off the roof, the matches would burn down everything, the sparks from the tips of the flames, torching the world and all the heartbroken people in it.