Quotes From "Survivor" By Chuck Palahniuk

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

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

Reality means you live until you die...the real truth is nobody wants reality. Chuck Palahniuk

These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful. Chuck Palahniuk

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

If you never have sex you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from adults. It's by having sex that adolescents first rebel. And if you never have sex, you never grow beyond everything else your parents taught you. If you never break the rule against sex, you won't break any other rule. Chuck Palahniuk

She says, "Do you have any rubbers?" I say, I thought she was barren. "Sure, I'm sterile, " she says, "but I've had unprotected sex with a million guys. I could have some terrible fatal disease." I say that would only be a problem if I wanted to live a lot longer. Fertility says, " That's how I feel about my giant credit card debt." So we have sex. If you could call it that. Chuck Palahniuk

You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe until the event. Until it's too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble Chuck Palahniuk

The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage. Chuck Palahniuk

The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a stamp that said DEAD. The caseworker told me this a few years ago when the suicides started back up again. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. This is how things get recycled. Chuck Palahniuk

The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God’s most selfish children would steal God’s greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death. This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick. Only God has the right to surprise His children with death. Chuck Palahniuk

Suicide is very contagious. Chuck Palahniuk

You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. Until it's too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble. So you just walk home. Chuck Palahniuk

Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified? Chuck Palahniuk

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

Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list. Chuck Palahniuk

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

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. Chuck Palahniuk

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

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. Chuck Palahniuk

Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here. Chuck Palahniuk

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