Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Every generous illusion of youth leaves a wrinkle as it departs. Experience is the successive disenchanting of the things of life; it is reason enriched with the heart's spoils.

There was nothing, nothing to depend on. And why was I surprised?

I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

The prospect of success in achieving our most cherished dream is not without its terrors. Who is more deprived and alone than the man who has achieved his dream?

It is bitter to think of one's best years disappearing in this unpolished country.

I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.

No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.

But then, my entire life is bullshit. The best things in it have vanished, ghosts. Ghosts I'll admit I created.

What is experience? A poor little hut constructed from the ruins of the palace of gold and marble called our illusions.

He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality

The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.

My idealism has not abated, but I have witnessed it withering away nationwide, to the point where at least among the young, to have ideals is akin to being blinkered and oldfashioned.

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.

It’s not so much that nothing means anything but more that it keeps meaning nothing. there’s no release, just gurus and self- appointed gods and hucksters. the more people say, the less there is to say. even the best books are dry sawdust.

I'm getting old. And I'm disappointed in everything just the way old people traditionally, boringly are. That bothers me because is it too traditional? Am I not fighting hard enough? I don't feel the fight. I don't feel it.

She felt the abyss of disenchantment.

The only true aging is the erosion of one's ideals.

O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

It all meant something. Until it didn't.

Madonna, she still has not showed, we see this empty cage now corrode, where her cape of the stage once had flowed, the fiddler he now steps to the road, on the back of the fish truck that loads, while my conscience explodes.

My son did not show signs of a money deficiency until he opened his small fist in the nursery and found it was empty.

A Poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay: Grown-up Was it for this I uttered prayers, And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, That now, domestic as a plate, I should retire at half-past eight?

To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-mei

Now, after so many years, I understand what the Coldness was and where it came from—this sense that everything is lost, and worthless, and meaningless.