Chuck Palahniuk

Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?

And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people.

I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.

All the demons of Hell formerly reigned as gods in previous cultures. No it's not fair, but one man's god is another man's devil. As each subsequent civilization became a dominant power, among its first acts was to depose and demonize whoever the previous culture had worshipped. The Jews attacked Belial, the god of the Babylonians. The Christians banished Pan and Loki anda Mars, the respective deities of the ancient Greeks and Celts and Romans. The Anglican British banned belief in the Australian aboriginal spirits known as the Mimi. Satan is depicted with cloven hooves because Pan had them, and he carries a pitchfork based on the trident carried by Neptune. As each deity was deposed, it was relegated to Hell. For gods so long accustomed to receiving tribute and loving attention, of course this status shift put them into a foul mood.

The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn__ know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.

For instance, if Jesus Christ had died in prison, with no one watching and with no one there to mourn or torture him, would we be saved?With all due respect.According to the agent, the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get.

Give me lust, baby.Flash.Give me malice.Flash.Give me detached existentialist ennui.Flash.Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.Flash.

Everybody looks a little crazy if you're looking close enough and if you can't look that close, then you don't really love them.

His saliva tasted like the wet dicks of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.

Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle,_ Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside. This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don__. And every year it burns, there__ more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve. Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year. The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What__ left of them...__hen you think about it from a native plant perspective,_ Oyster says, __ohnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist._ Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox.

They'd told him he had talent. That word was heroin to the young. Talent

Scratching Yogi's ears Michelle says 'That's just part of his job, the comforting. That's what I mean by the bhatisvata. That he's more concerned with comforting and helping, even more than his own well-being." This is a trait that more "people" should encompass.

You young people, you who think you invented fun and drugs, fuck you

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.

My secret wish is right now to be romancing this dead girl. A dead girl. Any dead girl. I'm not what you'd call choosy.

Every garden looks beautiful in May.' Meaning: Everyone is somewhat attractive when she's young.

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.