Megan > Megan's Quotes

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this—through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication—we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. One of the most difficult problems is to construct these barriers of such a height and strength that one has a true harbor, a sanctuary away from crippling turmoil and pain, but yet low enough, and permeable enough, to let in fresh seawater that will fend off the inevitable inclination toward brackishness.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“What you don't understand you can make mean anything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“A shadow
of a reflection
of an image
of an illusion.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
― May Sarton

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned.
Adult. You have become adult.”
― Harlan Ellison, Paingod and Other Delusions

“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.”
― Albert Einstein

“belief is the death of intelligence.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”
― Freidrich Neitzsche

“We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.”
― Santosh Kalwar, Quote Me Everyday

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
― Plato

“The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“Wisest is she who knows she does not know.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy

“The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without: to follow one's own path, not that of the crowd.”
― Nicholas Tharcher, Rebels & Devils; A Tribute to Christopher S. Hyatt

“Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I am, therefore I'll think.”
― Ayn Rand

“I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage”
― Fredrich Nietzsche

“The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible”
― William S. Burroughs

“When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.”
― Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery

“If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, "He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.”
― Epictetus

“Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Our ability to adapt is amazing. Our ability to change isn't quite as spectacular.”
― Lisa Lutz, The Spellmans Strike Again