Chuck Palahniuk

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.

No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

"A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
"Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.

We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.

Sex pretty much cures everything.

Torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.

I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.

We'll never be as young as we are tonight.

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.

Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight.

The camera obscura.

Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you think every thing you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned.

Make me into anything, but just love me.

Maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.