Doomed Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

you're doomed at being you.

Religions exist because people would rather have a wrong answer than no answer at all.

It's exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth.

When you die, trust me, the most difficult person to leave behind is yourself.

I irritate; therefore I am.

The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.

Even if you tell yourself "Today I'm going to drink coffee the wrong way ... from a dirty boot." Even that would be right, because you chose to drink coffee from that boot. Because you can do nothing wrong. You are always right. Even when you say, "I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong..." you're right. You're right about being wrong. You're right even when you're an idiot. No matter how stupid your idea, you're doomed to be right because it's yours.

The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture.

Good and evil have always existed. They always will. It’s only our stories about them that ever change.

Writing an honest blog is how you unlive your life.

Set yourself a goal so difficult that death will seem like a welcome reprieve.

How could you ever bring yourself to love so deeply if you truly knew how brief a lifetime could be?

WHat I learned is, it's never too late to save anybody. And it's always too late. And what are the chances you'll make any difference?

I love and adore all of my family, except when I'm with them.

Here's one night when I control the chaos. I participate with the doom I can't control. I'm dancing with the inevitable, and I survive....My regular little dress rehearsal...the day I finally meet Death, the two of us will be old, long-lost friends. Me and Death, separated at birth.

How could you let me love something that was going to die?

The body ages, grows, passes through near-lunatic phases of reproductive frenzy, but you are born and die essentially the same person. That... that is proof of your deathless soul.

Civilization is a condition which unsocial misfits impose on the rest of popular, easygoing, family-oriented humanity. Only the miserable, the failures, the outcasts will crouch for days to observe the mating habits of a salamander.

Peter used to say, "The only thing an artist can do is describe his own face." You're doomed to being you. This, he says, leaves su free to draw anything, since we're only drawing ourselves. Your handwriting. The way you walking. Which China pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a Diary.

Amber saw getting infected as the ultimate commitment. Like her and the guy would be doomed to be with each other. Looking back, she figured a brush with death would make her really enjoy her life. Like she would feel more alive.

Even after you're dead it hurts just as bad when your heart swells up, stretched bigger and bigger like an aneurysm of tears getting ready to boom.

This isn't anywhere I haven't been before. I've given up. In words muffled with exhaustion I whisper a prayer for my heart to stop.

It’s exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth.

Between wiener juice and lung blood, I’d say that chambray shirt was a goner.

Every unkind remark or crude gesture by others is a blessing, an opportunity to exercise our own capacity to forgive.

Do you believe in an afterlife? Do your personal beliefs include a life after death?—no matter how they phrase their snotty test, do the following. Simply look them in the eye, snort derisively, and retort, “Frankly, only a provincial ignoramus would even believe in death.

Where I'm at is a big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, sitting in the dark while I try to rescue the doomed bits and pieces of life, in the hope that a mere story can become Noah's Ark and deliver all the living things of the past to a bright and glorious immortality?

Purgatory is where you unwrite the book of your life story

By the middle of the novel I decided that what two people don't say to each other forges a stronger bond than honest.

Not merely godforsaken, I feel forsaken by everyone.

People in love—with nurturing, attentive non-movie-star parents—they would never invent gravity. Nothing except deep misery leads to real success.

People in love -with nurturing, attentive non-movie-star parents- they would never invent gravity. Nothing except deep misery leads to real success.

because the rubber, too, is bulletproof. And so relentless is the wind that it rakes the street, pushing along this burden of crippled vermin, trundling this tide of suffering always in the wake of the Town Car as it reaches Spaulding Square. Fissures of lightning

I'm thirteen years old, and I'm somewhat overweight. Meaning: I'm dead and fat. Meaning: I'm a piggy-pig-pig, oink-oink, real porker. Just ask my mom. I'm thirteen and fat - and I will stay this way forever. And yes, I know the word ulcerate. I'm dead, not illiterate.

Precious souls as young as three or four, raised on the misplaced multicultural priorities of Sesame Street,” he claims, “are doomed before they even enter the godless morass of the public school system.

...please accept the fact that people do not change over time.The elderly are, in reality, age tikes.Conversely, the young are juvenile codgers.Granted, we might develop some skills, achieve some profound insights over a lifetime, but by and large who you are at eighty-five is who you were at five.One is either born intelligent or not.The body ages, grows, passes through near-lunatic phases of reproductive frenzy, but you are born and die the same person.

My mom would spy by satellite, turning down the air conditioning, colder and colder, with a tapping keystroke via her wireless connection, chilling that house, that one room, meat locker cold, ski-slope cold, spending a king's ransom on Freon and electric power, trying to make some doomed ten bucks' worth of pretty pink flowers last one more day.

Like it or not, the road to Hell is paved with sustainable bamboo flooring.

Civilization is a condition which unsocial misfits impose on the rest of popular, easygoing, family-oriented humanity.

Plainly and simply put, Purgatory is where you unwrite the book of your life story.

How could you ever bring yourself to love so deeply if you truly knew how brief a lifetime can be?

Flecked and blotched with the stains of decomposition, the linen would trace a rambling journey in which everything you love falls apart.

Why do the impulsive notions of a would-be do-gooder always translate into the ideals of the next civilization?

Nothing offers better public relations fodder than something you can rescue and love intensively for a month and then be filmed burying at a lavish funeral.

I just want to die, says Mr. K, "and have everything be happy and painless. Forever.

I was eleven years old with menarche barreling down on me like a speeding bloodmobile.

Every direction I could see to go was just a different nightmare.

...but my mom's going to hate being hated. she's a skinny beautiful lady with perfect hair; she's just not equipped to deal with hate.

Niemand kennt die komplizierten Abkommen, die zwei Leute miteinander aushandeln, um länger als die ersten zehn Minuten verheiratet zu bleiben.

if history remembered him as an idiot, well, he was only one among billions of people. History could spare one man. All men are doomed to spend most of their existence among the dead.

Please note, you future dead persons, whenever you shut off a fluorescent bulb or a cathode ray tube and see a residual photon-green glow, that glow is trapped human ectoplasm. Ghosts are forever being snared in lightbulbs.

Which is why God has erected such a firewall between the living and the dead: because the predead always distort whatever the postalive tell them. Jesus or Mohammad or Siddharta, whenever any dead person has come back to offer some banal bit of advice, the living recipient misinterprets every word of it.

from Tokyo to Managua,

Eventually, when I stepped back inside the parlor door, only my nana's body was left on the sofa. The best of her--her laugh, her stories, even her coughing--was gone.

Gentle Tweeter,

Schlechte Erinnerungen sind besser als gar keine.

Glaubt mir, für meine Mutter ist das nicht nur Schauspielerei; sich im Bett harpunieren zu lassen ist eine ihrer Lieblingsbeschäftigungen.

Die vagabundierende Physiologie dieser shoppenden, fressenden, herumhurenden Klumpen belebten Fleischs, sie schändet einen.

Wenn das Totsein erst einmal den Reiz des Neuen verloren hat, scheint ein gewisses Unbehagen an seine Stelle zu treten.

Zivilisation ist ein Zustand, den ungesellige Eigenbrötler dem Rest der unbeschwerten, familienorientierten Menschheit auferlegen.

Die Avantgarde auf allen Gebieten besteht aus den Einsamen, den Freundlosen, den Uneingeladenen. Jeglicher Fortschritt kommt von den Unbeliebten.

Wie friedlich ist eine Welt, wo jeder Anstoß erregt und niemand Anstoß nimmt.

Mir entgeht keineswegs, dass es hier um den zentralen Konflikt meines Lebens geht: Ich liebe meine Familie über alles, außer wenn ich mit ihr zusammen bin.

Das Quietschen von Bettfedern, das Klatschen von Haut auf nackter Haut, das alles war ein biologisches Versprechen, dauerhafter als jedes Ja-Wort.

In der Mitte des Romans angelangt kam ich zu dem Schluss, dass das, was zwei Leute einander nicht sagen, ein stärkeres Band zwischen ihnen schmiedet als Aufrichtigkeit.

Das Einzige, was die Gegenwart genießbar macht, ist die Tatsache, dass die Vergangenheit manchmal eine Folter war.

Ich ärgere mich, also bin ich.

Alle werden eines grässlichen Todes sterben … ist das nicht toll?

Sie sind glücklich, wie Menschen glücklich sind, wenn sie Bücher verbrennen oder Könige enthaupten. Die sind rechtschaffen.

Wenn meine Eltern sich Gott überhaupt einmal vorstellten, dann als himmelhohen berggroßen Schwulenrechtler, der mit geflügelten Delfinen anstelle von Cherubim das Ozonloch repariert. Und Regenbögen, jede Menge Regenbögen.

It’s worth noting up front that I have always conceived of my mind as a digestive organ. A stomach for processing knowledge, if you will. As a looping, wrinkled mass, a human brain unmistakably looks like gray intestines, and it’s within these thinking bowels that my experiences are broken down, consumed to become my life story. My thoughts occur as flavorful burps or acrid barf. The indigestible gristle and bone of my memories are expelled as these words.

Ich hatte die ganze Zeit gedacht, die beiden ziehen über meinen Großvater her, aber dann wurde mir klar, die meinten mich. Das heißt, natürlich meinten sie irgendeinen verrückten Killer, aber das war immer noch ich, die ich da in Häschenpantoffeln und Pelzmantel saß.

Der Gedanke hat seinen Reiz, dass ich längst dem Untergang geweiht war und dass alle, die ich liebte, mehr über mich wussten als ich selbst. Wenn dem so ist, bin ich von allem freigesprochen, was ich falsch gemacht habe. Ich bin wehrlos und ahnungslos, aber ohne Schuld.

Im Nachhinein betrachtet habe ich denselben strategischen Fehler wie Charles Manson begangen. Ich hätte aufhören sollen, solange ich noch bloß eine stinknormale Tiersex- und Drogensüchtige war, aber nein, ich musste meinen Status zu einer potentiell messerschwingenden Psychopathin steigern

But just in case you don’t want to spend eternity giving yourself high colonics on some sleazy Web site, ogled by millions of men with serious intimacy problems, the other type of work which most people do in Hell is—telemarketing. Yes, this means sitting at a desk, elbow-to-elbow with fellow doomed telemarketing associates who stretch to the horizon in either direction, all of you yakking on headsets. My job is: The dark forces are constantly calculating when it’s dinnertime anywhere on earth, and a computer autodials those phone numbers so I can interrupt everyone’s meal. My goal isn’t actually to sell you anything; I just ask if you have a few seconds to take part in a market research study identifying consumer trends in chewing gum. In mouthwash. In dryer fabric-softener sheets. I get to wear my headset telephone and work from a flowchart of possible responses. Best of all, I get to talk to real-live people—like yourself—who are still living and breathing and have no idea that I’m dead and phoning them from the Afterlife. Trust me, the vast majority of telemarketing people who ring you up, they’re dead. As are pretty much all Internet porn models.

Nikhilananda’s birthday. Maybe we’d Morris dance, naked, around the base of an old-growth California redwood, its branches lavishly festooned with the soiled hammocks and poop buckets of crunchy-granola tree sitters mentoring spotted owls in passive-resistance protest techniques. You get the picture. In place of Santa Claus, my mom and dad said Maya Angelou kept tabs on whether little children were naughty or nice. Dr. Angelou, they warned me, did her accounting on a long hemp scroll of names, and if I failed to turn my compost I’d be sent to bed with no algae. Me, I just wanted to know that someone wise and carbon neutral—Dr. Maya or Shirley Chisholm or Sean Penn—was paying attention. But none of that was really Christmas. And none of that Earth First! baloney helps out once you’re dead and you discover that the snake-handling,