Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.

Sometimes seeming happy can be self-destructive even when you're sane.

I do entertain a lot of negative thoughts and I haven't got any self-belief. But I haven't done bad for someone without any self-belief.

I didnt like being reminded about how self-absorbed i was. I wanted to be over this, done with this. I didnt want to live in a broken world or a broken me. I wasnt trying to weasel out of anything. I just wasnt in the mood of being on the earth that night. I get like that sometimes when it rains, or when i see certain sad movies.

The counterpart of the suicide is the seeker; but the difference between them is slight.

The self-help section of national bookstore chains in America is one of the largest sections. In a way, it's nothing new, and in another way, very new. People have always searched for answers; that's why we have religion. People have always been seeking some relief from their own mortality.

My first four books, from 'Fight Club' to 'Choke,' dealt with personal identity issues. The crises the narrators found themselves in were generated by themselves.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

When you defeat somebody, you're not really defeating them: they're defeating themselves.

I feel like I am nowhere near perfect and I have my really rough days and my really off days, but I think being aware of it is the first step to helping yourself.

I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.

I don't think you're human unless you go through some [self-destructi on].

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.

Authentic spirituality is revolutionary. It does not legitimate the world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world, it shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it undone.

You cannot escape what you have to deal with inside yourself. It will never bring good things. It will only bring madness.

I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

I'd like to lose interest in myself.

Ruin and recovering are both from within.

The performances of others are often selected as standards for self-improvement of abilities

How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos.

In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.

It really is the relationship you have with your self that presents the key to the “kingdom”, so to speak... Fighting is good, but not when it is fighting yourself. Changing the world is good but first one has to start inside and concurrently make that place right. The strife and the ugliness in the world is the outward manifestation of this troubled relationship we have within on a whole.

And what if, in order to keep on living, I have to continue to accept myself?