Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

If I was starting off now, I would probably have taken one or two different turnings along the way.

One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one’s regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward you will wish you had done something different.

There's a lot of things in my past that wouldn't have necessarily been my choices but at the same time, going back in time and changing something, I wouldn't want to do that because I like where I came out.

I remember once imagining what my life would be like, what I'd be like. I pictured having all these qualities, strong positive qualities that people could pick up on from across the room. But as time passed, few became qualities that I actually had. And all the possibilities I faced, and the sorts of people I could be, all of them got reduced every year to fewer and fewer until finally they got reduced to one - to who I am. And that's who I am.

Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment, and the choices I make today or tomorrow or next week will lead me to the next and next present moments in my life. It is all a journey, Miss Jewell. I have come to understand that that is what life is all about-a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgement about what was right and what was wrong.

There are times when I wish I could go back and change the course of my life. Make different choices...But the past cannot be changed, and we carry our choices with us, forward, into the unknown. We can only move on. Do you remember that I told you that at Spence?

I'm older, and I wish that a lot of things that I did in my life, I didn't do, but I'm able to talk about it.

The time has come to get clear about who you are and what you choose. There must come moments in every person's life when a decision is necessary. A big decision. A major choice. Such a time is now. What you get to choose today is who you are and who you choose to be, and what you wish to experience in your life. Remember, not to decide is to decide.

Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.

Once you start to question your life you get to a higher level of awareness. It's like turning a light on-voila you see you have choices and choices are sacred.

It's kind of a test, Mary, and it's the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens, then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That's all.

If my life had gone in a different direction - some of the choices you makes when you're in your teens and your early 20s, I fortunately feel that I haven't been marked by those things.

There are times for inner changes. Be ready for the choice!

Will you look back on life and say, 'I wish I had,' or 'I’m glad I did'?

The years I have squandered in puerile excitement, in going hither and thither, in seeking to force nature and time, I ought to have spent in solitude and meditation, in endeavoring to make myself worthy of being loved.

I can say I made a lot of mistakes, but I don't regret things. Because at least I didn't spend a life standing outside, wondering what living would be like.

She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

Don't bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.

Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.

Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination.

I don’t regret any of the decisions I’ve made in my life. Because with every choice I’ve made, I’ve learned something new.

Looking back, I should have pursued philosophy and economics and things of that sort in college more, but I didn't.

Men regret their life has been ill-spent, but this does not always induce them to make a better use of the time they have yet to live.

Only as we keep an open communication with our deep inner life will we have the wisdom to make effective choices.