Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

If you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane.

I never think I'm old enough to play someone's dad, even though I have a daughter of my own and a grandson.

Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old. Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.

The presence of a grandparent confirms that parents were, indeed, little once, too, and that people who are little can grow to be big, can become parents, and one day even have grandchildren of their own. So often we think of grandparents as belonging to the past; but in this important way, grandparents, for young children, belong to the future.

I grew up in a big family with a lot of kids around, and I definitely want to have children as well.

I think at the prospect of bringing children into the world, your mortality comes very much to the forefront, absolutely.

I always assumed that like my mother before me, one day I would have children.

The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.

Few things are more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own.

Our children are not going to be just 'our children' - they are going to be other people's husbands and wives and the parents of our grandchildren.

In considering the ledger equal, understand the greatest gift you have given your parents is the opportunity to raise you. The things a child gets from parents can't compare to the things a parent gets from raising a child. Only by experiencing this can you understand the degree to which children give meaning to parents' lives.

Everybody has this idea: You have children, and your entire life is complete. That's how I imagine it. I imagine I'll have children and then my whole life will just seem complete.

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

With our parents we bury our past, with our children our future.

When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will stay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves.

Before I had my first child, I never really looked forward in anticipation to the future. As I watched my son grow and learn, I began to imagine the world this generation of children would live in. I thought of the children they would have, and of their children. I felt connected to life both before my time and beyond it. Children are our link to future generations that we will never see.

Three of my children married Jewish people. One did not and that marriage didn't last more than half a dozen years or so. The others are still very close.

When I consider how little of a rarity children are -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them -- that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains -- how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. -- I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them.

The reason most people have kids is because they get pregnant.

I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things. My first three novels were all about families. Things that happen in a house within a family, because you're a child or because you want to keep the family together, you suffer things you might not have had to suffer if you weren't in that situation.

Something about family and trying to relate it to the movie with, 'Oh, if I was to have a child how many kids do I want?' And 'do I want a boy or a girl?' I didn't realize you could place orders, I honestly didn't realize it was like a drive-through, that you could talk to a little electronic voice.

When an elder turns to face the dead, that means he turns away from facing the future and his own retirement in Phoenix, let's say. He turns and finds himself facing the children.

When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard 'having children' as a question of pro's and con's, the great turning point has come.

Whenever one of my children says, 'Goodnight, Daddy,' I always think to myself, 'You don't mean that.

I have daughters and I have sons./When one of them lays a hand/On my shoulder, shining fish/Turn suddenly in the deep sea.