Chuck Palahniuk Quotes on People (25 Quotes)

In the way our world is, everybody shoulder to shoulder, people knowing everything about you at first glance, a good veil is your tinted limousine window. The unlisted number for your face. Behind a good veil, you could be anyone.

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people.

Some people are just born human, the rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there.

A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.

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 arenÆt. 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.

I tell everybody, I'm tired of being jerked around. Okay? So let's just not pretend. I don't have fuck for a heart. You people are not going to make me feel anything. You are not going to get to me.

These old people. These human ruins.

We're all trapped. It's always 1734. All of us, we're stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic.

There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.

This is our world now, and those ancient people are dead.

Waiters will always pee in soup, people will always fall in love.

I hate how I don't feel real enough unless people are watching.

Just for the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.

Language was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. People can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood. We don't live in the real world anymore, we live in a world of symbols.

You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel strong. You save people by letting them save you. All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog. People really need somebody they feel superior to. So stay downtrodden. People need somebody they can send a check at Christmas. So stay poor. Charity isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. stone crumbles. wood rots. people, well, they die. but things as fragile as a though

The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

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.

People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.

The problem in this case was you just cant be a middle-aged virgin in America without something be wrong with you. People cant conceive of a virtue in someone else that they cant conceive in themselves. Instead of believing youre stronger, its so much easier to imagine youre weaker. Youre addicted to self-abuse. Youre a liar. People are always ready to believe the opposite of what you tell them.

The future is just wasted on some people.

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.