Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.

To be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered is the ambition of the dead.

When I'm dead I don't want a funeral. I want people to remember me alive.

The dead have need of fairy tales too.

When we die we are only stories in the minds of others, I thought

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

Just because someone's dead doesn't mean it's over. My grandfather died more than 25 years ago, but I still think of him a lot and smell his smell.

It's funny the way most people love the dead. Once you are dead, you are made for life.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

I am not concerned about my posthumous fame. Monuments are no good to the dead.

Maybe everyone lives forever. Or maybe, like in the animated movie 'Coco,' only those whose stories get told by the living definitely do. It takes a story worth telling.

The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

Only our memories allow that some people ever existed. That they mattered, or mattered too much.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

People often ask me how would I like to be remembered and I answer that I would simply like to be remembered.

So when I'm killed, don't wait for me, Walking the dim corridor; In Heaven or Hell, don't wait for me, Or you must wait for evermore. You'll find me buried, living-dead In these verses that you've read.

What do people fear most about death? I asked the reb. "Fear?" he thought for a moment. 'Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?" That's big. "Yes. But there's something else." What else? He leaned forward. "Being forgotten," he whispered.

In death, lie. In living, cry. Carry me home to remember to be remembered.

If I die tomorrow or in a year, it is the same — it is the message you leave behind you that counts.

At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.

Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.