“People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days. ”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“If we can forgive what’s been done to us . . .
If we can forgive what we’ve done to others . . . If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce a risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book. . . . A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a "mass medium." No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“A book is as private and consensual as sex.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“If we can forgive what has been done to us . . .
If we can forgive what we've done to others . . .
If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being
villians or victims.
Only then can we maybe rescue the world.
But we still sit here, waiting to be saved. While we're
still victims, hoping to be discovered while we suffer.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“Most people would never admit it, but they'd been bitching since they were born. As soon as their head popped out into that bright delivery-room light, nothing had been right. Nothing had been as comfortable or felt so good. Just the effort it took to keep your stupid physical body alive, just finding food and cooking it and dishwashing, the keeping warm and bathing and sleeping, the walking and bowel movements and ingrown hairs, it was all getting to be too much work.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“Without animals, there would be no humanity. In a world of just people, people will mean nothing . . .”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“Kids, she says. When they’re little, they believe everything you tell them about the world. As a mother, you’re the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. But after they hit some magic age, it’s just the opposite. After that, you’re either a liar or a fool or a villain.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“You cannot be the person they know and the great, glorious person you want to become. Not at the same time.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“As young people we want something to slow us down and keep us trapped in one place long enough to look below the surface of the world. That disaster is a car crash or a war. To make us sit still. It can be getting cancer or getting pregnant. The important part is how it seems to catch us by surprise. That disaster stops us from living the life we'd planned as children - a life of constant dashing around.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“The air will always be to filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That’s the earth. Why it goes around. We’re the rocks. And what happens to us—the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse—why, that’s just the water and sand to
erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“An important part of building a new culture was allowing people to complain about their past. At first, the more they complained, the worse the past would seem. But by venting, people could start to resolve the past. By bitching and bitching and bitching, they could exhaust the drama of their own horror stories. Grow bored. Only then could they accept a new story for their lives. Move forward.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“How can you possibly believe he really loves you?” Miss Sneezy looks from the Mother to the Saint to Mr. Whittier’s hand.“You have no choice,” Mr. Whittier tells her. “If you need to be loved.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“That’s how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It re-creates some forgotten terror. Something we’d like to think we’ve grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It’s something you’d hoped was healed.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“You digest and absorb your life by turning it into stories,' he says, 'the same way this theater seems to digest people.' With one hand, he points to a carpet stain, this dark stain sticky and growing mold, branched with arms and legs.
Other events—the ones you can’t digest—they poison you. Those worst parts of your life, those moments you can’t talk about, they rot you from the inside out. Until you’re Cassandra’s wet shadow on the ground. Sunk in your own yellow protein mud.
But the stories that you can digest, that you can tell—you can take control of those past moments. You can shape them, craft them. Master them. And use them to your own good. Those are stories as important as food. Those are stories you can use to make people laugh or cry or sick. Or scared. To make people feel the way you felt. To help exhaust that past moment for them and for you. Until that moment is dead.
Consumed. Digested. Absorbed.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb. ”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“I fainted....and you ate my ass?
You fed me my own ass?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“We’d turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we’d survive to talk about.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
“Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted
Chuck Palahniuk
Born place: in Pasco, WA, The United States
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“Take pride in your pain; you are stronger than those who have none”
― Lois Lowry, quote from Gathering Blue
“There you'll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You'll see why a person would want to live there forever. Dawn, morning, mid-day, night: all the same, except for the changes in the air. The air changes the color of things there. And life whirs by as quiet as a murmur...the pure murmuring of life.”
― Juan Rulfo, quote from Pedro Páramo
“It’s like being a fairy named Mary,” he goes on. “Or a vampire named Gampire,” I say. “Gampire isn’t even a proper name, Snow. You’re terrible at this game.”
― Rainbow Rowell, quote from Carry On
“What is the use of stories that arent even true?”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Haroun and the Sea of Stories
“If you can heat some bourbon, I can drink it," said the kzin. "If you cannot heat it, I can still drink it." "Nessus?”
― Larry Niven, quote from Ringworld
A Time to Speak
Bay's End
Lichgates
Love May Fail
The Ancient Secret o...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
