Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

I don't want to be someone that you're settling for. I don't want to be someone that anyone settles for. Marriage is hard enough without bringing such low expectations into it, isn't it?

Work on psychological blocks like shame and guilt - they falsely color your reality.

When something's painful, you just avoid it. Why bother dredging up the past if it's nothing but bad stuff?

I find it just simply takes me right back to those times, and I really can't take it, I don't want to, I mean, why should I face up to it? What good does it do me? I know it happened, and that's it.

Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life.

I spent an awful lot of my life underestimating myself and, as a result, not exceeding my own expectations.

The primary limitation in life is our low expectations for ourselves and others. When we expect minimum results, that's usually what we get.

We hurt ourselves not by what we ask for, but what we settle for.

I was waiting for the right guy to come along, but maybe I didn't actually want one, or was not available emotionally. I was really nervous about including him in the book [Superficial: More Adventures from the Andy Cohen Diaries], but this relationship has developed over a year and a half, and so it would've been dishonest not to.

Some wounds cut us so deep that they stop us. Stop us from letting go, from growing up, from seeing the truth.

I grew up bar-singing and saw all kinds of ways people tried to outrun their emotional pain. It doesn't work. You end up with the original pain, as well as new pain added on top of it from the tactics you used trying to avoid it in the first place. It's best to take a deep breath, bolster yourself, and walk through it.

I found myself in a pattern of being attracted to people who were somehow unavailable, and what I realized was that I was protecting myself because I equate the idea of connection and love with trauma and death.

If your standards are low, you're going to stop pretty early on in the process.

We substitute, or we rather hide, this fear of real intimacy by a superficial kind of friendliness, which is quite nice, but nevertheless, very shallow.

I think I’ve developed this pattern of running away when it comes time to fall in love and stay in a relationship.

Feelings come and go, unless you don't feel them. Then they stay, and hurt, and grow pear-shaped and weird.

I didn't have a girlfriend until I was 29, and I thought it was because I'm in a wheelchair. And I realized that it's not that, it's because I listened to what the dismissive part of society was telling me and accepted it as truth. There was nothing that was keeping me from dating or falling in love other than the fact that I was scared of being rejected. And everybody has that fear. That's a universal thing.

Mrs. Lynde says, 'Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.

The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret.

Crackpot is an excellent job because the expectations are so low. No one ever tells crackpots that they should be doing more.

In the track of fear we have so many conditions, expectations, and obligations that we create a lot of rules just to protect ourselves... when the truth is that there shouldn't be any rules. These rules affect the quality of the channels of communication between us.

Love is scary, like anything else, whether you're falling in love, whether you're discovering love in something else...if you're really going to jump off the cliff, when you meet somebody that you love you're going to jump off that cliff, you've got to give them everything. And when you have a kid, it's on a much greater level.

One reason that a lot of people see me as cheerful and optimistic is that my expectations are really rather low.

What often seemed like meanness or coldness was really fear of emotions and intimacy.

Disappointment is the gap that exists between expectation and reality.