Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

There's always this thing of wanting to be elsewhere.

Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out.

I was always a 'grass is greener' kind of guy.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd even bothered.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

Is the modern social pattern of unending change and movement the cause of two modern diseases, insecurity and dissatisfaction? How lucky Thomas Hood was to be able to write, 'I remember, I remember the house where I was born.' I don't even know what mine looked like!

There are times when you wish you were somewhere else, and someone else.

No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.

In all climates, under all skies, man's happiness is always somewhere else.

I was not content at home. . . I wanted to live like a colorful butterfly in the sun.

Stress is caused by being 'here' but wanting to be 'there'.

I want to push the fast-forward button until I get back to happy.

This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.

But even in her laughter there was something missing. She never seemed to be truly happy; she just seemed to be passing time while she waited for something else. She was tired of just existing; she wanted to live.

I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says anywhere but here.

The discontented believe that their regrets are about the past.

The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.

I'd never been content in America.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.

We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

I've always had this deep and chronic sense of dissatisfaction.