Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.

It’s easier to kill people, when you’re dead yourself. I mean, it’s not such a big deal. You’re not so prejudiced any more.

I am profoundly fascinated by cruelty, fear, horror and death. My films show my preoccupation with violence, the pathology of violence.

Nothing scares me. Nothing actually shocks me anymore.

I think people are getting more and more - unfortunately - inured to violence. People are like, less sensitive to things they should wake up about.

It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.

He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body. But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away.

What does it mean when your heart's already numb? You're a professional.

Have you tried to drive a harpoon through a body? No? Tut, tut, my dear sir, you must really pay attention to these details.

One strange feeling, which I remember clearly, was a powerful link with the slain, particularly those that had fallen within the past hour or two. There was so much death around that life seemed almost indecent. Some men's uniforms were soaked with gobs of blood. The ground was sodden with it. I killed, too.

What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?

A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliché.

The awful thing is that if i can forget they're people, it will be no different at all

The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.

Football is brutality. Football is career-ending, life-threatening injury just by stepping on the field.

Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening

First, I blow a hole in your face; then I go back inside, and sleep like a baby... I guarantee you.

When you're pushed killing is as easy as breathing.

If you run across a dog driving, would you ever forget that? You could never forget that, that bump. It'll haunt you for the rest of your life. Imagine if you killed a human being. You're not going to forget that. Well, I killed many.

A man who can take anything will find most things unsatisfying. And a man without memories is just a shell.

Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.

Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.

Turns out I'm really good at killing people. Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.