Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Getting to a place of comfort can be uncomfortable.

Revelations come when you're in the thick of it, pitting yourself up against something larger than yourself.

What is hard to remember when you're in the middle of it is that when you get through to the other side, you always walk away with a gift. If you can stand in there and not walk away from it, you get transformed by it.

I guess that one of the most important things I've learned is that nothing is ever completely bad. Even cancer. It has made me a better person. It has given me courage and a sense of purpose I never had before. But you don't have to do like I did...wait until you lose a leg or get some awful disease, before you take the time to find out what kind of stuff you're really made of. You can start now. Anybody can.

Each of us face a moment in our lives called 'the breakdown moment.' This is the time when you must stand toe to toe, eyeball to eyeball, with the very thing you have tried desperately to avoid. In that moment, when there is nothing standing between you and the thing you fear the most, you will be forced to step into your greatness, because that is what life is demanding of you.

Every time you meet a situation you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

In times of adversity and change, we really discover who we are and what we're made of.

What molds us is what maims us.

The process of growth is, it seems, the art of falling down. Growth is measured by the gentleness and awareness with which we once again pick ourselves up, the lightness with which we dust ourselves off, the openness with which we continue and take the next unknown step, beyond our edge, beyond our holding, into the remarkable mystery of being.

Brimstone once told me that to stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength.

To gain your heart's desire you have to lose some part of your old life, your old self. To do that you have to have courage; without it, you can't make the leap. And if you don't make the leap you have only three choices: You can hate yourself for not taking the chance, you can hate the person from whom you've sacrificed your happiness, or you can hate the one who offered you happiness, and blame them for your lack of courage, convince yourself it wasn't real.

Overcoming difficulties leads to courage, self-respect, and knowing yourself.

I become a happier man each time I suffer

We can never be like lillies in the garden unless we have spent time as bulbs in the dark, totally ignored.

Sometimes it's the toughest moments that you learn the most about yourself, and the more you know yourself, the less you are willing to give away.

Your adventure has to be coming out of your own interior. If you are ready for it then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. It's the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.

No man, with a man's heart in him, gets far on his way without some bitter, soul-searching disappointment. - Happy he who is brave enough to push on another stage of the journey, and rest where there are "living springs of water, and three-score and ten palms."

I have been to hell and back, and let me tell you, it was wonderful.

There have been many people for whom limitations, failure, loss, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility and compassion. It made them more real.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.

Yet I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. And so, FAREWELL.

I'm filled with awe, as I always am, as I watch her transform from a woman who calls me to kill a spider to a woman immune to fear.

Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet & dancing slippers had slipped away & there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies & turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage except the indestructible red earth on which she stood.

We no longer need to show people being brave: instead, we can examine how they became brave. We can assume that they didn't start out that way. If we allow that they started out just like us, then their journey into courage becomes both more fascinating and more impressive.