Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Sometimes, getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth is the hardest part of the day - it all just hurts.

One does not expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the latter is almost forgotten.

My back hurts real bad, every day. All those bumps took their toll. But life is good and I wouldn't have it any other way.

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.

Even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own.

The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered.

There's the media-driven universe, in which the public perceives you in a superficial way. Then there's the universe that you actually inhabit, where you have to get up even if you didn't sleep so well, and you feel like crap and your face is swollen.

I kissed him on the cheek and left to find Bobby Lee. Him, I trusted to be in the line of fire. But it was more than that: I wasn't sleeping with bobby Lee. I didn't love him. Sometimes love makes you selfish. Sometimes it makes you stupid. Sometimes it reminds you why you love your gun.

I was feeling miserable physically, in a lot of pain to the point where it was almost crippling me, especially creatively. I decided to take that and use it as an inspiration for getting out of bed and making something again.

Life is an irritation.

Every man is two men; one is awake in the darkness, the other asleep in the light.

I had to groan a bit on the couch when my brow was mopped - as it is when you've been shot across the chest.

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

Life is a tragedy filled with suffering and despair and yet some people do manage to avoid jury duty.

With the lights out, It's less dangerous. Here we are now, Entertain us. I feel stupid, And contagious. Here we are now. Entertain us.

My body's feeling sore, but my soul is feeling pretty good.

I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.

The world is a grindstone and life is your nose

I'm especially interested in relationships since that is a part of life that causes enormous pain for many people.

I suppose I envy painters because they can meditate on form and structure, on color and light, and not concern themselves with human torment and chaos. It is restful even to imagine expression without words.

If I've learned anything in twenty-nine years, it's that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift - bad choice of words - is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

The reason I didn't like cocaine is it made me do stupid things, have stupid conversations, and stay awake until 11 o'clock in the morning unable to think, read, sleep or speak.

You've gotta learn to love the grind. Because life IS the grind.

The adept may reach one of those rare moments that spell illumination -- aware of the light of the consciousness that illumines our consciousness as the sun dawns on the sleeping earth and bathes it in effulgence.