“Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“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.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love.
Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.
At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“In a world where vows are worthless.Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“History is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“When you think about it, Johnny Appleseed was a fucking ecological terrorist.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead.
You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value.Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melo-dramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“The voice says, 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.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“Anymore, no one's mind is their own.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“We're all of us haunted and haunting.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“Doesn't reincarnation strike you as just another form of procrastination?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“We're the culture that cried wolf.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“Some people still think knowledge is power.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“All you can do is hope for a pattern to emerge, and sometimes it never does. Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buy s a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound. You don't win with a lot of treble.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception. Think of deep outer space, the incredible cold and quiet where your wife and kid wait. Silence, not heaven, would be reward enough.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
“After long enough, everyone in the world will be you enemy.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Lullaby
Chuck Palahniuk
Born place: in Pasco, WA, The United States
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“Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quote from The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books I-II
“Without a word, I walked over to the door and opened it. And when the policeman stepped in, the look on Mr Bartholomew’s face was priceless.”
― Sophie Cleverly, quote from The Whispers in the Walls
“If you are anything other than humbled in the presence of love, you are not in the presence of love.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, quote from 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas
“«La gobernanta es la única persona que se encuentra bien en este lugar y la fábrica sólo trabaja para satisfacerla. Pero eso no pasa de ser una ilusión, ella no es más que un testaferro. El personaje principal para el que todo el mundo trabaja aquí es el diablo».”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from Stories
“After, presumably, Rosewater found out that Chekhov was not Jewish, he did not bother with any more questions about people with surnames ending with ov. That included my Israeli friend David Shem-tov. I don’t think you can find a more Israeli name than Shem-tov, but I could just imagine the Revolutionary Guards researchers saying to each other, “Chekhov, Molotov, Shem-tov, they are all the same!”
― Maziar Bahari, quote from Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival
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Palace of StoneBookQuoters 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.
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