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




    Picture anybody growing up so stupid he didn't know that hope is just another phase you'll grow out of.

    Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs. That's how beautiful she looks.

    Black-and-white chickens stagger around Colonial Dunsboros, chickens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chickens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled. There's an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it's made visible.


    If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.


    This is less teaching than damage control. You may as well paint a house that's on fire.



    So if you think this is going to save you...If you think anything is going to save you...Please consider this your final warning.

    This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.

    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.


    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.




    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.


    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.


    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.




    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.



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




    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.



    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.


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


    More Chuck Palahniuk Quotations (Based on Topics)


    World - People - Life - Love - Time - Future - Emotions - Place - Truth - God - Death & Dying - Beauty - Night - Attention - Woman - Money & Wealth - Education - Past - Honesty & Integrity - View All Chuck Palahniuk Quotations

    More Chuck Palahniuk Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - Asfixia
    - Choke
    - Fight Club
    - Invisible Monsters
    - Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
    - Survivor

    Related Authors


    Umberto Eco - P. D. James - Naguib Mahfouz - Maxim Gorky - Mario Puzo - Honore de Balzac - Fyodor Dostoevsky - Emily Bronte - Boris Pasternak - Anne Bronte


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