Chuck Palahniuk’s “Choke” Quotes (66 Quotes)

Every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?

I'm not so much a good friend as I'm the savior who wants you to worship him forever.

That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you'd never want to own or do another thing. That if you could eat or sleep enough, you'd never need more. That if enough people loved you, you'd stop needing love.

Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.

Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.

In good old Colonial Dunsboro, masochism is a valuable job skill. It is in most jobs.

That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our attention. Jacking off. Denial.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

Face it, dude. You nearly did sex on God's table. You're already shame spiralling big-time.

It sounds as if you'd like to be God.

The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point.

We live and we die and anything else is just a delusion.

For sure, they don't teach you this in history class, but in colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing less than fair game for everybody to nail. Men or women, anybody bent over had no way of knowing who was doing the ram job, and this was the real reason you never wanted to end up here unless you had a family member or a friend who'd stand with you the whole time. To protect you. To watch your ass, for real.

It's nice to see something more pathetic than I feel right now.

The girl traced the outline of her lover's shadow so she would always have a record of how he looked...

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.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I feel peaceful. Not happy. Not sad. Not anxious. Not horny. Just all the higher parts of my brain closing up shop. The cerebral cortex. The cerebellum. That's where my problem is. I'm now simplifying myself. Somewhere balanced in the perfect middle between happiness and sadness. Because sponges never have a bad day.

It's okay to cry as long as you're faking it.

The little boy smiled back at all the angry faces glaring in at him. And the little boy blew kisses.

We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.

He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.

I've been choking to death for years. By now this should be easy.

The lucky ones are just born dead.

When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

I am not loved. I am not a beautiful soul. I am not a good-natured, giving person. I am not anybody's savior.

Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do?

The only person we'll hate more than each other is ourselves.

When you're thinking about the rest of your life, you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.

I am the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.

Just let your hand drop; and let fate decide for you.

The same as real life, there is no happily ever after.

Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.

A male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.

Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit.

The skin along the parts in her hair, the skin above and behind the doctor's ears, is as clear and white as the skin inside her other tan lines must look. If women knew how their ears come across, the firm fleshy edge, the little dark hood at the top, all the smooth contours coiled and channeling you to the tight darkness inside, well, more women would wear their hair down.

You can't fool people into loving you.

Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit.

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.

Maybe the truth is I really want to like you instead.

The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

You gain power by pretending to be weak.

Anything you can aquire is only another thing you'll lose.

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.

More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can't stop.

There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.

At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut hosing orgasm.

My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.

There's still a thousand places I haven't gone to die.