Quotes from Survivor

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“You have a choice. Live or die.
Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.
If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.
There is no free will.
There are no variables.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“The joke is, we all have the same punchline.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I'm sick and tired of it.
How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages.
...
The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and the tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“and i can't stand the idea of being alone.
i can't bear the thought of being free.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“The problem in this case was you can't be a middle-aged virgin in America without something being wrong with you. People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weaker.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“To stand here and try to fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“The police are asking through the bedroom door, why did I make a batch of strawberry daiquiris before I called them?
Because we were out of raspberries.
Because, can't they see, it just does not matter. Time was not of the essence.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“Inside me is the same desperate hope I have watching the ravenous dead and thinking, Oh please, oh please, oh please.

The craving inside of me is to be clutched at by some dead girl. To put my ear to her chest and hear nothing. Even getting munched on by zombies beats the idea that I'm only flesh and blood, skin and bone. Demon or angel or evil spirit, I just need something to show itself. Ghoulie or ghosty or long-legged beastie, I just want my hand held.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“Nobody wants to worship you if you have the same problems, the same bad breath and messy hair and hangnails, as a regular person. You have to be everything regular people aren’t. Where they fail, you have to go all the way. Be what people are too afraid to be. Become whom they admire. People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser. When it comes to choosing a savior, they won't settle for just a human being.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“Imagine how you’d feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn’t stand.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

“Today is just one of those days the sun comes out to really humiliate you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Survivor

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Popular quotes

“Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences.”
― Thomas Mann, quote from Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person -- sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty -- and you get to pick three of those things. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, quote from A Little Life

“I will not pretend I wasn't petrified. I was. But mixed in with the awful fear was a glorious feeling of excitement. Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn't be exciting if they didn't.”
― Roald Dahl, quote from Danny the Champion of the World

“Are you going to be all right now? No more tears? I don't know how to handle crying girls. Every time my five-year-old sister turns on the waterworks, I end up buying her a Barbie. You don't need a new Barbie, do you?”
― Jessica Verday, quote from The Hollow

“Death cures all ills. Well, most of them.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, quote from Narcissus in Chains

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About BookQuoters

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.