Works by Chuck Palahniuk

"The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact. Every play-by-play description on the radio, the home runs and strikeouts, even that's delayed a few minutes. Even live television is postponed a couple seconds. Even Sound and light can only go so fast."

"The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead."

"You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound You don't win with a lot of treble. This isn't about quality. It's about volume. This isn't about music. This is about winning. You stomp the competition with the bass line. You rattle windows. You drop the melody line, and shout the lyrics. You put in foul language and come down hard on each cussword. You dominate. This is really about power."

"These people so scared of silence. These are my neighbors. These sound-oholics. These quiet-ophobics."

"We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics."

"No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline"

"No detail is too minor to note."

"Anymore, no one's mind is their own. You can't concentrate. You can't think. There's always some noise worming in. Singers shouting. Dead people laughing. Actors crying. All these little doses of emotion. Someone's always spraying the air with their mood."

"There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction. These people with dead children, you want to tell them, go ahead. Blame yourself. There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper."

"Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world."

"When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy them, but now they call this free will. At least the Greeks were being honest."

"The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up."

"In journalism school, what they want you to be is a camera. A trained, objective, detached professional. Accurate, polished, and observant. They want you to believe that the new and you are always two separate things. Killers and reporters are mutually exclusive. Whatever the story, this isn't about you."

"You don't become a journalist because you're good at keeping secrets. Being a Journalist is about telling. It's about bearing the bad news. Spreading the contagion. The biggest story in history. This could be the end of mass media. The Culling song would be a plague unique to the Information Age. Imagine a world where people shun the television, the radio, movies, the Internet, magazines, and newspapers. People have to wear earplugs the way they wear condoms and rubber gloves. In the past, nobody worried too much about sex with strangers. Or before that, bites from fleas. Or untreated drinking water. Mosquitoes. Asbestos."

"Imagine the books burning. And tapes and films and files, radios and televisions, will all go into that same bonfire. All those libraries and bookstores blazing away in the night. People will attack microwave relay stations. People with axes will chop every fiber-optic cable."

"Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. So just relax, Helen Boyle told me, and just enjoy the ride. She said, "Even absolute corruption has its perks."

"Our footsteps echo against the concrete floor. The steel roof hums with rain. And she says, 'Don't you feel, somehow, buried in history?'"

"These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics.""

"Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell."

"Here's Big Brother, singing and dancing, force-feeding you, so your mind never goes hungry enough to think."

"Until you deal with your real personal issues, you'll never be able to control yourself."

"Down through the ceiling comes a fire siren and people screaming that we're supposed to ignore. The gunshots and tires squeeling, sounds wee have to pretend are okay. They don't mean anything. It's just television. An explosion vibrates down from the upstairs. A woman begs someone not to rape her. It's not real. It's just a movie. We're the culture that cried wolf."

"When you think about it from a native plant perspective," Oyster says."Johnny Apple seed was a fucking biological terrorist."

"The way you can go to Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there's a McDonald's hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life-forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water hyacinths. Starlings. Burger Kings. The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out.. He says, "We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time.""

"Sure, everybody wants to play God, but for me it's a full-time job."

"According to Mona, you shouldn't kill people, because that drives you away from humanity. In order to justify killing, you have to make the victim your enemy. To justify any crime, you have to make the victim your enemy."

"Doctor Sarah didn't start out by attacking and berating everybody who called her radio show," Mona says. "She used to have a little time slot and a little audience, and she seemed to really care about helping people.""

"Still, he deserved to die. He called me an asshole."

"Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they'd leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a source of meat. These islands, they were pristine. These were home to breeds of birds with no natural predators. Breeds of birds that lived nowhere else on earth. The plants there, without enemies they evolved without thorns or poisons. Without predators and enemies, these islands, they were paradise. The sailors, the next time they visited these islands, the only things still there would be herds of goats or pigs. .... Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the ol' Adam and Eve story? .... You ever wonder when God's coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?"

"The masochist bullies the sadist into action. The most person person is actually the aggressor. Every day, just you living means the misery and death of plants and animals- and even some people. "Slaughterhouses, factory farms, sweatshops," she says, "like it or not, that's what your money buys.""

"In order to save the world, Jesus Christ suffered for about thirty-six hours on the cross. I am willing to suffer an eternity in hell for the same cause."

"Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up the reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro."

"Maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do."

"History is is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse."

"I need to rebel against myself. It's the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear."

"The more people die, the more things stay the same."

"Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value.Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melo-dramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away."

"Maybe this is why so many serial killers work in pairs. It's nice not to feel alone in a world full of victims or enemies."

"Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too.This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine."

"This culling poem is a blessing. Why do you think it was created in the first place? It will save millions of people from the slow terrible death we're headed for from disease, from famine, drought, from solar radiation, from war, from all the places we're headed."

""The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch."

"Either an ancient cursed Egyptian mummy has come back to life and is trying to kill the people next door, or they're watching a movie."

"People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown."

"What you forget when you're planning a hijack by yourself is somewhere along the line, you might need to neglect your hostages just long enough so you can use the bathroom."

"Someone bent on suicide won't have much sense of humor left."

"This is fish number six hundred and forty-one in a lifetime of a goldfish. My parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of God. Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground."

"People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone."

"Whether you clean a stain, a fish, a house, you want to think you're making the world a better place, but really you're just letting things get worse.You think if you work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you're changing a patio lightbulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you'll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you'll be dead. Time is running out. There isn't the energy you used to have. You start to slow down. You start to give in."

"Today is just one of those days the sun comes out to really humiliate you."

"I just want some proof that death isn't the end. Even if crazed zombies grabbed me in some dark hall one night, even if they tore me apart, at least that wouldn't be the absolute end. There would be some comfort in that."

"The craving inside of me is to be clutched at by some dead girl. To put my ear to her chest and be hearing nothing. Even getting munched on by zombies beats the idea that I'm only flesh and blood, skin and bone. Demon or angel or evil spirit, I just need something to show itself. Ghoulie or ghosty or long-legged beastie, I just want my hand held."

"“A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?" "Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.”"

"There's a terrible dark joy when the only person who knows all your secrets is finally dead."

"Kill myself? Thanks, I say. No thanks. Let's Not rush anything here."

"After the caseworker told me about everybody in the Creedish district colony being dead and all, the first thing I did was start smoking. THe smartest things I've ever done is start smoking. When the caseworker dropped by to say rise and shine, and the only other surviving Creedish went south last night, then I sat myself in the kitchen and upped my suicide process with a good stiff drink."

"The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing."

"Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you reenlist."

"The joke is, we all have the same punchline."

"If your body is a temple, you can pile up too much deferred maintenance. If your body is a temple, mine was a real fixer-upper."

"The same way every generation reinvents Christ, the agent's giving me the same makeover. The agent says nobody is going to worship anybody with my roll of flab around his middle. These days, people aren't going to fill stadiums to get preached at by somebody who isn't beautiful."

"You're going up and up and up and not getting anywhere. It's the illusion of progress. What you want to think is your salvation. What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too."

"According to the agent, the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get."

"The key to salvation is how much attention you get. How high a profile you get. Your audience share. Your exposure. Your name recognition. Your press following. The buzz."

"You realize people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling."

"You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. We can't give up our concept of who we were...Our way of getting nostalgic for what we just threw in the trash, it's all because we're afraid to evolve. Grow, change, lose weight, reinvent ourselves. Adapt."

"Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished."

"You realize that there's no point in doing anything if nobody's watching. You wonder, if there had been a low turnout at the crucifixion, would they have rescheduled?"

"You’re that tree falling in the forest that nobody gives a rat’s ass about."

"It's a shame," the agent says, "how medical technology is still lagging behind the marketing side of things. I mean, we've had all the sales support in place for years, the coffee mug giveaways to physicians, the feel-good magazine ads, the total product launch, but it's the same old violin in the background R&D is still years behind. The lab monkeys are still dropping like flies.""

"Reality means you live until you die, the agent says. "The real truth is nobody wants reality."

"I told the agent, I figured I'd spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest. The agent said that sounded pretty realistic."

"Whoever invented this routine, the agent tells me, they pretty much run things in hell."

"When you get famous, dinner isn't food anymore; it's twenty ounces of protein, ten ounces of carbohydrates, salt-free, fat-free, sugar-free fuel."

"Imagine how you'd feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn't stand. No, everybody thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation. I'd like to see these people even try to live out of hotel rooms and find low-fat fuel room service and do a half way convincing job of faking a deep inner peace and at-oneness with God."

"Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time."

"Just for the record, after my first three-month cycle of Deca-Durabolin I couldn't reach down far enough to tie my shoes; my arms were that big. Not a problem, the agent says, and he hires someone to tie all my shoes for me."

"Only God has the right to surprise his children with death."

"There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables."

"Do I need to tell you that prison makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like Minneapolis and St. Paul by comparison?"

"No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you choose, you'll never be totally happy."

"The Vietnam War didn't cause the mess of the 1960's" Adam says. "Drugs didn't cause ot. Well only one drug did. It was the birth control pill. For the first time in history, everybody could have all the sex they wanted. Everybody could have that kind of power."

"Throughout history the most powerful rulers have been sex maniacs. And he asks, does their sex appetite come from having power, or does their will for power come from their sex appetite? "And if you don't crave sex," he says, "will you crave power?" No, he says. "And instead of electing decent, boring, sexually repressed officials," he says "maybe we should find the horniest candidates and maybe they can get some good work done."

"The same way you might look at your leg cut off at the knee and not feel anything at first, maybe this is just shock. But I hope not. I don't want it to wear off. I pray not to feel anything ever again. Because if it wears off, this is all going to hurt so much. This is going to hurt for the rest of my life."

"You realize that there's no point in doing anything if nobody's watching."

"More and more everything in my life was a fix for an earlier fix for an earlier fix until I forget what the original problem was."

"Everything we can do is wrong as long as we're still alive."

"The feeling is you have no control. The feeling is that we're being delivered."

"The shortest distance between the points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life. Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list."

"You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. Until it's too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble."

"This is passive aggression in action""

"It's not that I want to get married."

"And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven?"

"Right now, me getting killed would be redundant."

"You could stab a knife right through my heart and you'd be too late."

"There is no Hell. There is no heaven."

"Scratched on the bathroom stall, it says, Heaven, the words say, is all-you-can-eat pussy buffet."

"It doesn't matter if you do anything. If nobody notices, your life will add up to a big zero. People are looking for how to put everything together. They need a unified field theory that combines glamor and holiness, fashion and spirituality. People need to reconcile being good and being good-looking."

"And the sky is blue and righteous in every direction."

"Just keep asking yourself: 'What would Jesus NOT do?'"

"So if you think this is going to save you..."

"The world won't end with a whimper or a bang, but with a discreet, tasteful announcement: 'Bill Rivervale, phone call holding, line two.' Then nothing."

""The way to remember the symptoms of melanoma is the letters ABCD."

"This is the world we live in. I've been there, taken the MCAT. The Medical College Admission Test. I went to the USC School of Medicine long enough to know that a mole is never just a mole. That a simple headache means brain tumors, means double vision, numbness, vomiting followed by seizures, drowsiness, death."

"A little muscle twitch means rabies, means muscle cramps, thrist, confusion, and drooling, followed by seizures, coma, death. Acne means ovarian cysts. Feeling a little tired means tuberculosis. Bloodshot eyes mean meningitis. Drowsiness is the first sign of typhoid. Those floaters you see cross your eyes on sunny days, they mean your retina is detaching. You're going blind."

"The diseases a mother can pass to her baby are : Toxoplasmosis, Other (meaning syphilis and HIV), Rubella, Cytomegalovirus, and Herpes. It helps if you can picture a mother passing the torch to her baby."

"The glue and resin smell in new cars is formaldehyde, she'd tell him, the same thing they use to preserve dead bodies."

"If you're ever in a big hotel lobby, and they start to play 'The Blue Danube Waltz,' get the hell out. Don't think, run."

"You tell me, what does it get you if you can square root a triangle and then some terrorist shoots you in the head?"

"Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be."

"Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple."

"Language... was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world."

"We live and die and anything else is just delusion."

"People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become."

"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."

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create."

"The past, the future, life on other planets, everything is such a projection of life as we know it."

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."

"The deluded little rube who thought he could ever earn enough, know enough, own enough, run fast enough, hide well enough. Fuck enough."

"It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed."

"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are...Or we can decide for ourselves."

"...maybe it's our job to invent something better. What's it going to be, I don't know...and maybe knowing isn't the point."

"Without access to true chaos we'll never have true peace."

"Parenthood being the opiate of the masses."

"When people dance to fire alarms and gun shots, something is wrong."

"Masochism is a valuable job skill."

"Torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer."

"It's the martyrdom of Saint Me."

"In America, if your addiction isn't always new and improved, you're a failure."

"All women have to do is get naked, and we give them all our money. I mean, why are we such slaves?"

"The magic of sexual addiction is you don't ever feel hungry or tired or bored or lonely."

"Nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it."

"Art never comes from happiness"

"Every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married"

"The magic of sex is it's acquisition without the burden of possessions. No matter how many women you take home, there's never a storage problem."

"We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces."

"By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself."

"How can it be prostitution if all the women were dead?"

"A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death."

"The only thing that separates us from the animals...is we have pornography."

"I mean, I'm just tired of being wrong all the time just because I'm a guy."

"(Insert word) isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind."

"Nobody can expect you to remember every near-death experience."

"Sponges don't have bad days."

"You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you. All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog... You're the proof of their courage. The proof they were a hero. Evidence of their success... You might be the one good deed, the deathbed memory that justifies their entire existence. [pg 50-51]"

"Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. And maybe knowing isn't the point."

"It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time trying to establish our own alternative reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos."

"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves."

"The half-moon looks up at us, reflected in a silver pie tin of beer. [...] Denny drinks about half the beer and says, "This is how they drink beer in Europe, dude." Out of slug traps? "No, dude," Denny says. He hands me the pie tin and says "Flat and warm.""

"...Because the moment this is over, we'll hate each other. The moment we find ourselves cold and sweating on the bathroom floor, the moment after we both come, we won't want to even look at each other. The only we person we'll hate more than each other is ourselves."

"(about Colonial Dunsboro) 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."

"... if enough people looked at you, you'd never need anybody's attention ever again. That if someday you were caught, exposed and revealed enough, then you'd never be able to hide again. There'd be no difference between your public and your private lives."

"Her attention span is about a clock tick long, and you can shove her on to a more pleasant topic. You can guess this is how men have been handling Eva's hostility for her whole life. Just distract her. Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away."

"There's an opposite to Deja vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar."

""Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal.”"

"And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people. [...] It got until she didn’t belong anywhere. It got so nobody was good enough, refined enough, real enough. [...] Nothing was as real as her imagined world."

"You can’t put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping. That quest for something pretty. A cheat. A cliché."

"The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect."

"If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion."

"Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way."

"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."

"Grace says, "We all die." She says, "The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.""

"There is nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics."

"What you don't understand you can make mean anything."

"Today is the longest day of the year-but anymore, everyday is. The weather today is increasing concern followed by fullblown dread. The man calling from Long Beach, he says his bathroom is missing."

"Dear sweet Peter. Can you feel this?"

"“... you people with your ex-wives and stepchildren, your blended families and failed marriages, you’ve ruined your world and now you want to ruin mine...”"

"If you're not drunk and half naked by this point, you're not paying attention."

"Leave this island before you can't."

"Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary."

"Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit."

"All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired."

"What she learned is what she always learns. Plato was right. We are all of us immortal. We couldn't die if we wanted to."

"If you're here, then you've failed again."

"We were here. We are here. We will always be here. And we've failed again."

"The official name for your liver spots is hyperpigmented lentigines. The official anatomy word for a wrinkle is rhytide. Those creases in the top half of your face, the rhytides plowed across your forehead and around your eyes, this is dynamic wrinkling, also called hyperfunctional facial lines, caused by the movement of underlying muscles. Most wrinkles in the lower half of the face are tatic rhytides, caused by sun and gravity."

"Your skin comes in three basic layers. What you can touch is the stratum corneum, a layer of flat, dead skin cells pushed up by the new cells under them. What you feel, that greasy feeling, is your acid mantle, the coating of oil and sweat that protects you from germs and fungus. Under that is your dermis. Below the dermis is a layer of fat. Below the fat are the muscles of your face"

"When you pull up your upper lip----when you show that one top tooth, the one the museum guard broke----this is your levator labii superioris muscle at work. Your sneer muscle. Let's pretend you smell some old stale urine. Imagine your husband's just killed himself in your family car. Imagine you have to go out and sponge his piss out of the driver's seat."

"When a normal person, some normal innocent person who sure as hell deserved a lot better, when she comes home from waiting tables all day and finds her husband suffocated in the family car, his bladder leaking, and she screams, this is simply her orbicularis stretched to the very limit."

"After you know about biology, you don't have to be used by it."

"Because you believed in her so much more than she did. You expected more from her than she did from herself."

"Everyone's in their own personal coma."

"You have endless ways you can commit suicide without 'dying' dying."

""Let’s look in the mirror. Really look at your face. Look at your eyes, your mouth."

"If you're a little confused right now, relax. Don't worry. All you need to know is this is your face. This is what you think you know best."

"Stendhal syndrome, Angel says, is a medical term. It's when a painting, or any form of art, is so beautiful it overwhelms the viewer. It's a form of shock. When Stendhal toured the Church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1817, he reported almost fainting from joy. People feel rapid heart palpitations. They get dizzy. Looking at great art makes you forget your own name, forget even where you're at. It can bring on depression and physical exhaustion. Amnesia. Panic. Heart attack. Collapse."

"Now, smile—if you still can."

"The weather today is increasing concern followed by full-blown dread."

"An artists job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble."

"Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anyone in the world. We're all such products."

"What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock-tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?"

"Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close."

"When it's time to reintroduce me to solid foods, their words again, it's pureed chicken and strained carrots. Baby foods. Everything mashed or pulverized or crushed. You are what you eat."

"The murderer, the victim, the witness, each of us thinks our role is the lead."

"Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. (ch3p32)"

"This is the world we live in. Conditions change and we mutate."

"Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly."

"Evie says that beautiful people should never date each other. Together, they just don't generate enough attention. Evie says there's a whole shift in the beauty standard when they're together. You can feel this, Evie says. When both of you are beautiful, neither of you is beautiful. Together, as a couple, you're less than the sum of your parts."

"Somewhere in heaven, you're live on a video web site for God to surf."

"Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education."

"When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"

"When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves."

"You have to keep recycling yourself."

"She has to take a needle and thread and sew herself up" ".. The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open"

"Rip yourself open. Sew yourself shut."

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known."

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."

"People just can't stand not knowing something, she says. Especially men can't stand not climbing every mountain, mapping everywhere. Labeling everything. Peeing on every tree and then never calling you back."

"Your folks are like God because you want to know they're out there and you want them to approve of your life, still you only call them when you're in crisis and need something."

"Seth says how your being born makes your parents god. you owe them your life, and they can control you."

"First," Manus says, "your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life."

"The whole time, growing up," Evie says, "I just thought being a woman would be...not such a disappointment."

"When you go out with a drunk, you'll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you're drinking, drinking is okay. Two's company. Drinking is fun. If there's a bottle, even if your glass isn't empty, he'll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own."

"Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them."

"Sometimes the best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize."

"The nurse brings me the personal classified ads from a newsletter. Sister Katherine peers down her nose and through the glasses to read: Guys seeking slim, adventurous girls for fun and romance. And, yes, it's true, not one single guy specifically excludes hideous mutilated girls with growing medical bills."

"The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill."

"Whatever you're thinking, a million other folks are thinking. whatever you do, they're doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort."

"The world," Brandy says, "is your cradle and your trap."

"And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap."

"The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger."

"Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night."

"Evie starts telling me about an idea she has for a remake of Cinderella, only instead of the little birds and animals making her a dress, they do cosmetic surgery. Bluebirds give her a facelift. Squirrels give her implants. Snakes, liposuction. Plus, Cinderella starts out as a lonely little boy."

"[W]e're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes" Brandy says, "I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life."

"Our real discoveries come from chaos."

"It's because we're so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the"

"A sexual reassignment surgery is a miracle for some people, but if you don't want it, it's the ultimate form of self-mutilation."

"Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct."

"When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people."

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."

"Mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody."

"Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definitely that goes for everybody in the world."

"That's what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can't know I'm its mother. It's so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that's what I love about fire."

"Go figure, but Texans seem to be a lot more comfortable around disastrous house fires than they are around anal sex."

"The truth is, being ugly isn't the thrill you'd think, but it can be an opportunity for something better than I ever imagined."

"The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend."

"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."

"You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth."

"Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited."

"Do the things that scare you the most."

"Make me into anything, but just love me."

"What I wanted looked more and more like what I'd always been trained to want."

"When I met you, I envied you. I coveted your face. I thought that face of yours will take more guts than any sex change operation. It will give you bigger discoveries. It will make you stronger than I could ever be."

"Jump to present time with my folks sitting on lawn chairs at night, and watching these same super-8 movies projected on the white side of the same white house, twenty years later. The house the same, the yard the same, the windows projected in the movies lined up just perfect with the real windows, the movie grass aligned with the real grass, and my movie-projected brother and me being toddlers and running around wild for the camera."

"Nobody's all-the-way dead yet, but let's just say the clock is ticking."

"Sorry, mom. Sorry, God."

"Now," those Plumbago lips say, "You are going to tell me your story like you just did. Write it all down. Tell that story over and over. Tell me your sad-assed story all night." That Brandy queen points a long bony finger at me. "When you understand," Brandy says, "that what your telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."

"Be famous. Be a big social experiment in getting what you don't want. Find value in what we've been taught is worthless. Find good in what the world says is evil. I'm giving you my life because I want to whole world to know you. I wish the whole world would embrace what it hates."

"You know how you look at ugly hunchback girls, and they are so lucky. Nobody drags them out at night so they can't finish their doctorate thesis papers. They don't get yelled at by fashion photographers if they get infected ingrown bikini hairs. You look at burn victims and think how much time they save not looking in mirrors to check their skin for sun damage."

"I wanted the everyday reassurance of being mutilated. The way a crippled deformed birth-defected disfigured girl can drive her car with the windows open and not care how the wind makes her hair look, that's the kind of freedom I was after."

"This makeover would make piercings and tattoos and brandings look so lame, all those little fashion revolts so safe that they themselves only became fashionable. Those little paper tiger attempts to reject looking good that only end up reinforcing it."

"Him yelling, Give me lust, baby."

"Haute couture and getting hauter."

"It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way a gun is power."

"Anymore, when I see the picture of a twenty-something in the newspaper who was abducted and sodomized and robbed and then killed and here's a front-page picture of her young and smiling, instead of me dwelling on this being a big, sad crime, my gut reaction is, wow, she'd be really hot if she didn't have such a big honker of a nose. My second reaction is I'd better have some good head and shoulder shots handy in case I get, you know, abducted and sodomized to death. My third reaction is, well, at least that cuts down the competition."

"Give me empathy."

"Give me attention."

"Don't expect this to be the kind of story that goes: and then, and then, and then."

"Just remember, the same spectacular Vogue magazine, remember that no matter how close"

"The fashion photographer inside my head, yells:"

"Vogue on location."

"Going outside, the world is all color after the white-on-white of the hospital. It's going over the rainbow. I walk up to a supermarket, and shopping feels like a game I haven't played since I was a little girl. Here are all my favorite name-brand products, all those colors, French's Mustard, Rice A Ronni, Top Ramen, everything trying to catch your attention."

"When you understand," Brandy says, "that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."

"Give me tolerance."

"And the crowd of shoppers is bailed, leaving just us and the security cameras instead of God watching to catch us when we fuck up."

"Birds ate my face."

"Jump to the week after Manus's last visit, last meaning final, when Evie drops by the hospital. Evie looks at the glossies and talks to God and Jesus Christ."

"Save the world with some advice from the future."

"I'm an invisible monster, and I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse."

"The nun's arrived with the man ad his I.V. stand, a new man with no skin or crushed features or all his teeth bashed out, a man who'd be perfect for me. My one true love. My deformed or mutilated or diseased prince charming. My unhappily ever after. My hideous future. The monstrous rest of my life."

"She'd wear shades of lipstick you'd expect to see around of the base of a penis."

"Don't you think that somehow television makes us God?"

"Ancient aboriginal petroglyphs and junk are just whizzing past"

"All around us, erosion and insects are just chewing up the world, never mind people and pollution. Everything biodegrades with or without you pushing."

"The wild daisies and Indian paintbrush are just the genitals of a different life form."

"The future is just wasted on some people."

"Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another."

"We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create."

"How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?"

"It's not living alone if you keep a rifle under your bed."

"If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible."

"You're safe because you're trapped inside your culture."

"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."

"It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't love."

"A Million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me."

"What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself."

"People all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future."

"The truth is I was addicted to being beautiful, and that's not something you just walk away from. Being addicted to all that attention, I had to quit cold turkey."

"I wanted to give up the idea I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone."

"You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody."

"People in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: esprit d'Escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer but it's too late. So you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So, under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party...As you start down the stairway, then - magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put down. That's the Spirit of the Stairway. The trouble is, even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do."

"To create a race of masters from a race of slaves, Mr. Whittier said, to teach a controlled group of how to create their own lives, Moses had to be an asshole."

""It's not a matter of right and wrong," Mr. Whittier would say. Really, there is no wrong. Not in our minds. Our own reality. You can never set off to do the wrong thing. You can never say the wrong thing. In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take--what you do or say or how you choose to appear--is automatically right the moment you act."

"What you have to love about drinking is, every swallow is an irrevocable decision. You charging ahead, in control if the game. It’s the same with pills, sedatives and painkillers, every swallow us a first definite step down some road."

"Stink for privacy, the new way to protect personal space. Intimidation by odor."

"A journalist has a right... ...and a duty, to destroy the golden calves he helps create."

"You are permanent, but this life is not," Mr. Whittier would say. "You don't expect to visit an amusement park, then stay forever."

"The earth, he'd say, is just a big machine. A big processing plant. A factory. That's your big answer. The big truth. Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That's the earth. Why it goes round. We're the rocks. And what happens to us--the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse--why, that's just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright."

"In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was a kind of tumbler. The same as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we're meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothing bad about this. This wasn't suffering. It was erosion. It was just another, a basic, an important step in the refining process."

"Every apostle or disciple," Mrs. Clarke says, "as much as their running to follow they're savior-they're running just as hard to escape something else."

"For the rest of history, all over the world, people will be trying to save this same dead woman. This woman who just wanted to die."

"You can't unfuck a kid. Once you fuck a kid, you can't get that genie back in the bottle."

"This is just what human beings do-turn objects into people, people into objects. Back and forth. Tit for tat."

"As a fundraiser, our first idea was 'Five Bucks to Punch a Mime.'"

""Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you." p205"

""What matters," Sister Vigilante says, "is, people need a monster they can believe in." A true horrible enemy. A demon to define themselves against. Otherwise, it's just us versus us."

"With the angel of death going door to door, people stayed together. They quit bitching and behaved."

"I lost my virginity through my ear."

"The whole idea of men creating perfect robot women for their own pleasure, it happens every day. The most "beautiful" women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotypes of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of Cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look."

"We should forgive God..."

"Chapter 19, Absolution"

"That's how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It recreates some forgotten terror. Something we'd like to think we're grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It's something you'd hoped was healed."

"If there's a trick to doing a job you hate... Mrs. Clark says it's to find a job you hate even more."

"We love drama. We love conflict. We need a devil or we'll create one."

"Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us," Mr Whittier says, "It's how we digest our lives. Our experiences."

"If we can forgive what's been done to us... If we can forgive what we've done to others... If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world."

""I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong again." p76"

""The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors." p144"

"People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves."

"Some stories, Mr.Whitter would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up. p288"

"Some stories, you use up. Others use you up."

"The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real."

"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy if you waste their gift sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport."

"That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell."

"Their teeth white, as if they never used teeth for anything except to smile."

"Some stories, she'd say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be."

"Until you can ignore your circumstances, and just do as you promise," he says, "you'll always be controlled by the world."

"You will always have some excuse not to live your life."

"Her dress, swimsuit-tight, leotard-tight, her pantyhose run with women pedaling bicycles going nowhere at a thousand calories an hour."

"Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die."

""This isn't really death," Tyler says, "We'll be legend. We won't grow old." I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you're thinking of vampires."

"You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die."

"We have a sort of triangle thing going on here. I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me."

"Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels"

"Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash."

"This is when I'd cry because right now, your life comes down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion."

"It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero."

"This was therapeutic physical contact, Chloe said. we should all choose a partner. Chloe threw herself around my head and cried. She had strapless underwear at home, and cried. Chloe had oils and handcuffs, and cried as I watched the second hand on my watch go around eleven times."

"This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you."

"Strangers with this kind of honesty make me grow a big rubbery one, if you know what I mean."

"This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom."

"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."

"If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?"

"One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection."

"One day you're thinking and hauling yourself around, and the next, you're cold fertilizer, worm buffet."

"I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact I was breathing."

"Funerals are nothing compared to this," Marla says. "Funerals are all abstract ceremony. Here, you have the real experience of death."

"I wasn't the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue."

"You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."

"Tyler said, "I want you to hit me as hard as you can.""

"You can swallow about a pint of blood before you're sick."

"The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club."

"The second rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club."

"Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer. Tyler never knew his father. Maybe self-destruction is the answer."

"What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women."

"My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said get a job. When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married. I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need."

"Fight club isn't about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn't about words."

"You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood."

"There's hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved."

"Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered."

"Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed."

"After Tyler and Marla had sex about ten times, Tyler says, Marla said she wanted to get pregnant. Marla said she wanted to have Tyler's abortion...How could Tyler not fall for that."

"The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing so she won't commit to anything."

"Marla shouts to the police that the girl who lives in 8G used to be a lovely charming girl, but the girl is a monster bitch monster. The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong things so she won't commit to anything. "The girl in 8G has no faith in herself," Marla shouts, "and she's worried that as she grows older, she'll have fewer and fewer options." Marla shouts, "Good luck.""

"Worker bees can leave Even drones can fly away The queen is their slave"

"I embrace my own festering diseased corruption."

"You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger."

"What Marla loves, she says, is all the things that people love intensely and then dump in an hour or a day after. The way a Christmas tree is the center of attention, then, after Christmas you see those dead Christmas trees with the tinsel still on them, dumped alongside the highway. You see those trees and think of roadkill animals or sex crime victims wearing their underwear inside out and bound with black electrical tape."

""Sticking feathers up your butt," Tyler says, "does not make you a chicken."

"Tyler says I'm nowhere near hitting bottom, yet. And if I don't fall all the way, I can't be saved. Jesus did it with his crucifixion thing. I shouldn't just abandon money and property and knowledge. This isn't a weekend retreat. I should run from self-improvement, and I should be running toward disaster. I can't just play it safe anymore. This isn't a seminar."

"Only after disaster can we be resurrected. "It's only after you've lost everything," Tyler says, "that you're free to do anything.""

"At the store, they have 100% recycled toilet paper," Marla says. "The worst job in the world must be recycling toilet paper."

"This..is a chemical burn," Tyler says, "and it will hurt worse than you've ever been burned. Worse than a hundred cigarettes...You'll have a scar."

"With enough soap," Tyler says, "you could blow up the whole world."

"Combined with water, lye heats to over two hundred degrees, and as it heats it burns into the back of my hand, and Tyler places his fingers of one hand over my fingers, our hands spread on the lap of my bloodstained pants, and Tyler says to pay attention because this is the greatest moment of my life."

"You have to see, Tyler says,"how the first soap was made of heroes." Think about the animals used in product testing. Think about the monkeys shot into space. "Without their death, their pain, without their sacrifice,: Tyler says, "we would have nothing."

"Getting fired," Tyler says, "is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we'd quit treading water and do something with our lives."

"I come dragging in with every muscle bruised inside and out, but my heart's still racing and my thoughts are a tornado in my head. This is insomnia. All night, your thoughts are on the air. All night long, you're thinking: Am I asleep? Have I slept?"

"There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love."

"This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention. If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window. You had their full attention. People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. And when they spoke, they weren't telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before."

"Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't."

"Disaster is a natural part of my evolution," Tyler whispered, "toward tragedy and dissolution."

"I'm breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions," Tyler whispered, "because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit."

"The liberator who destroys my property," Tyler said, "is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free."

"Nothing is static. Everything is falling apart. I know this because Tyler knows this."

"Tyler had nothing to lose. Tyler was the pawn of the world, everybody's trash."

"The First Rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions...The Second Rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions....The Third Rule of Project Mayhem is that in Project Mayhem there are no excuses....The Fourth Rule of Project Mayhem is that you cannot lie....The Fifth Rule of Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler."

"When Tyler invented Project Mayhem, Tyler said the goal of Project Mayhem had nothing to do with other people. Tyler didn't care if other people got hurt or not. The goal was to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world."

"What Tyler says about the crap and the slaves of history, that's how I felt. I wanted to destroy something beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground. Don't think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing."

"For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born."

"I wanted to breathe smoke. I wanted to burn the Louvre. I'd do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now. This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead."

"Recycling and speed-limits are bullshit," Tyler said. "They're like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed."

"It's Project Mayhem that's going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover."

"Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world."

"This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and right-away destruction of civilization."

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile."

"Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing."

"The mechanic says, "If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?""

"How Tyler saw it was that getting God's attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God's hate is better than His indifference. If you could be either God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?"

"We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention. Unless we get God's attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption. Which is worse, hell or nothing? Only if we're caught and punished can we be saved."

"Burn the Louvre," the mechanic says, "and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names."

"The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back."

"You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need."

"We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression."

"We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them."

"Raymond K. L. Hessel, your dinner is going to taste better than any meal you've ever eaten, and tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your entire life."

"Remember this," Tyler said. "The people you're trying to step on, we're everyone you depend on. We're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you're asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life. "We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll all be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact," Tyler said. "So don't fuck with us."

"The first time I met Tyler, I was asleep. I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn't see any way to change things. Only end them. I felt trapped. I was too complete. I was too perfect."

"What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand, and Tyler was sitting in the palm of a perfection he'd made himself. And a moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection."

"On a long enough time line, everyone's survival rate drops to zero."

"One minute, Robert Paulson was the warm center that the light of the world crowded around, and the next moment, Robert Paulson was an object. After the police shot, the amazing miracle of death."

"If you're male, and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And sometimes you find your father in your career."

"How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash. I am Ozymandias, king of kings."

"And the fight goes on and on because I want to be dead. Because only in death do we have names. Only in death are we no longer part of Project Mayhem."

"I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?" Why did I cause so much pain? Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong. We are not special We are not crap or trash either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, "No, that's not right Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything."

"Parts of Fight Club have always been true. It’s less a novel than an anthology of my friends’ lives. I do have insomnia and wander with no sleep for weeks. Angry waiters I know mess with food. They shave their heads. My friend Alice makes soap. My friend Mike cuts single frames of smut into family features. Every guy I know feels let down by his father.Even my father feels let down by his father."

"One bite of venom, one little squirt of poison at the time, Rant was training for something big. Getting vaccinated against fear. No matter the future, any terrible job or marriage or military service, it had to be an improvement over a coyote chomping on your foot. Page 72"

"Not everyone enjoys baseball or even fishing, but every person is obsessed with himself. You're your own favorite hobby."

"Most of Party Crashing was just us driving in cars, talking."

"Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future people won't be famous for fifteen minutes. No, in the future, everyone will sit next to someone famous for at least fifteen minutes."

"The young men and women who acquire perfect breasts and muscles before they know how to use that power end up pregnant and mired so close to home. This cycle concentrates the best genetics in places you'd never imagine. Like Middleton. Little nests of wildly attractive idiots who give birth and survives into a long, ugly adulthood."

"Rant Casey just wanted one thing to be real. Even if that thing was stinking with blood and guts.""

"Crimes to end all crimes, wars and plagues, preached to be the end of the world. Every year of newspaper announcing another new end of the world."

"'You're our little angel.' Most mothers talk the same way, in the moment when they're still one person with their child."

"That afternoon, Rant quit being to his mother what his "Bear" was to him. That was the real moment he was born. The start of Rant as a real person."

"The big reason why folks leave a small town," Rant use to say, "is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out."

""Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere." Page 12"

""Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you." pg 13"

"Nothing says you have to swallow this," Rant told me. "You can always just die.""

"What ‘Typhoid Mary’ Mallon was to typhoid, what Gaetan Dugas was to AIDS, and Liu Jian Lun was to SARS, Buster Casey would become for rabies."

"This is what church should feel like."

"You only ever is in the eyes of other folks."

"“You grow up to become living proof of your parent's limitations. Their less-than-masterpiece."

""What bothered Rant was the fake, bullshit nature of everything."

"Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies."

"You burn out your brain with rabies. Go all theta-trance-y with driving. You hit something and wake up naked in history."

"What if reality is nothing but some disease? Page 215"

"There's worse ways to be dead than dying."

"Couldn’t you guess that old time gods and saviors like Jesus and Isis and Shiva are just losers with beater Torinos and Mustangs who went party crashing and found a way to ‘sever their origins’? Maybe they all started as real nobodies, and as their reality faded, a new story piled up around them?"

"Do you ever wish you’d never been born?"

"In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display."

"A sexually conflicted thirteen-year-old rattlesnake venom junkie with rabies. It's safe to say that's every father's worst nightmare.""

"If just one leader would emerge- Rant Casey or anybody- the arms of us, ready to fight and die, wouldn't we be invincible?""

"I've survived, that, the day I finally meet Death, the two of us will be old, long lost friends. Me and Death, separated at birth. Page 198"

""Everyone wants to feel special - attain a special status among their peers - but not too special. Most kids only want to be special the same way their friends are special."

"You're a different human being to everyone you meet. Page 18"

"Some people are just born human. The rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there." Page 18"

"History is, its just a nightmare. Cut off tongues lying everywhere..""

"To everybody, everybody else is a liar.""

"You can get plenty of folks telling the same lie if they got a stake in it. You get everybody telling the same lie and it ain't a lie, not no more""

"How folks lay claim to a loved one is they give you a name of their own. They figure to label you as their property.""

"The future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday.""

"It's compelling that so many cultures practice a meticulous yet transitory art form as a spiritual ritual, prayer, or meditation...Whether it's the Piranski eggs or the sand mandalas of the Tibetan Buddhists, their common theme is to somehow achieve an intense focus and complete absorption of the artist's attention. Despite the fragile nature of the artwork, the process becomes a means of stepping outside the temporal."

"Love is a skill you learn. Like house-training a dog. Maybe a talent you do or do not build up. Like muscle. And if you can't learn yourself to love blood family, then you'll never truly love. Not nobody...If you don't accept your folks for all their worst ways, no stranger can ever measure up.""

"In my classroom, I tried to impress on the students that reality is a consensus. Objects, from diamonds to bubble gum, only have value because we all agree they do. Laws like speed limits are only laws because most people agree to respect them. ""

"Money you don't work to earn, you spend very quickly.""

"It's spooky to consider, us turning teeth into gold and gold into eyeballs. Things in life is either flesh or money, like they can't be both at the same time. That would be like somebody being both alive and dead. You can't. You got to choose."

"Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged-in and living lives boosted to them from other people. Hand-me-down adventures.""

""By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior. Each of those three traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped-up tests to build a child's faith and imagination. The first test is to believe in a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: To believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money. From a man to an animal to a fairy. From toys to candy to money. Thus, interestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairydom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickels...dimes...and quarters. In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as her or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency." pg 61-62"

"Each holiday tradition acts as an exercise in cognitive development, a greater challenge for the child. Despite the fact that most parents don't recognize this function, they still practice the exercise. Rant also saw how resolving the illusions is crucial to how the child uses any new skills. A child who is never coached with Santa Claus may never develop an ability to imagine. To him, nothing exists except the literal and tangible. A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or his siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe in anything--tangible or intangible--again. To never trust or wonder. But a child who relinquishes the illusions of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, that child may come away with the most important skill set. That child may recognize the strength of his own imagination and faith. He will embrace the ability to create his own reality. That child becomes his own authority. He determines the nature of his world. His own vision. And by doing so, by the power of his example, he determines the reality of the other two types: those who can't imagine, and those who can't trust.""

"A clear corollary formed between sunny weather and the number of boys suffering from painful penile erections. At issue wasn't the penises, but the failure to occlude them while in their turgid state. Furthermore, the district's legal counsel advised that a dress code requiring constraining, modest, fully binding undergarments would be impossible to enforce and serve the negative purpose of drawing increased attention to the issue. Our chief effort intended to deal with the issue of engorged phalluses obliquely and indirectly. Legal counsel advised no direct condemnation of erections on school property. No district representative was to acknowledge or attempt to mask or resolve any obvious erections.""

"Rant advocating for us, our demands included a therapeutic, all-hours lunchroom, since it's a known impossibility to eat food and maintain a woody. We asked for nothing short of equal recognition for our biological...but the next word stumped us. Should we say "obstacles"?"Handicaps"?"Disabilities"? This last word, we tortured over. We finally settled on the word "burden," asking for "full and equal recognition of the burden inherent in the male anatomy." Hearing how "burden" sounded fine and noble. ""

"Though it was widely rumored that certain students abused medications designed to treat erectile dysfunction, legal counsel advised that no just cause existed for requiring students to submit urine for drug testing. Legal counsel cautioned that, though some tumescence may result from illegally obtained prescription drugs, the majority of genital arousal was naturally occurring and thus protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act.""

"Even Party Crashing can get boring if you can't find another team that's flying the designated flag, but at least it's a communal boredom. Like a family.""

"Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic system. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.""

"Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising along in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega clearance, close-out, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?""

"The 'Baby on Board' events used another type of mishap flag. Understandably, public reaction was somewhat less jolly at the sight of a speeding car weaving through traffic with an infant carrier and baby seemingly forgotten on the roof.""

"You study any pretty democracy, from the ancient Greeks forward, and you'll see that the only way each system functions is with a working class of slaves. Peons to haul the garbage so the upper crust can campaign and vote.""

"It was Thomas Jefferson who warned us that any nation would always need a frontier as an escape valve or a place to store the perennial tide of lunatics and idiots."

"No shit, there's worse ways to be dead than dying.""

"If you'll ponder the though, no one ever closes a thoroughfare due to the death of an individual...Death is a tragic event, but stopping the flow of traffic is always seen as the greater crime.""

"On the traffic cameras, the Droolers used to limp around, dragging one leg, slack-jawed, snarling. People who used to be wives, fathers, and even little kids, now--completely gone berserk, lurking in public toilets and department-store fitting rooms with one goal: to sink their spitty teeth into somebody.""

"Not to be overly moralistic, but sometimes the death of one person can justify the death of an entire culture.""

"The chief argument against the possibility of time travel is what theorists refer to as the "Grandfather Paradox"; this is the idea that if one could travel backward in time one could kill one's own ancestor, eliminating the possibility said time traveler would ever be born--and thus could never have lived to travel back and commit the murder. In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.""

"How lame is this? We really believe a strip of paint down the middle of the road is going to keep us safe. That white or yellow line is some kind of protection.""

"What makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven."

"If you can watch much television, then being dead will a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead."

"The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our head says, 'I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew.' Meaning: I may be me - but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU."

""A woman eats to feed her pussy." Meaning: Anything we do to excess is in compensation for not getting a minimum amount of sexual gratification....Men overimbibe alcohol because their penises are thirsty."

"It simply makes sense that I should miss my parents more than they miss me, especially when you consider that they only loved me for thirteen years while I loved them my entire life."

"Old habits die hard."

"In Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth."

"Yes, and I know that when a super-sexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smokey eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's the kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive 'let them eat cake' type of chauvinism."

"[I]f you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. A child allows us to revisit the excitement we once felt about, well...everything. A generation later, our grandkids bump up our enthusiasm yet again. Reproducing is a kind of booster shot to keep us loving life."

"If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.""

"What do I think I am? In a thousand words....I don't have a clue, but I'll start by abandoning hope. Please help me, Satan. That would make me so happy. Help me give up my addiction to hope."

"To prove that I exist I must kill you....If you are, in fact, my continuing author, then killing you will end my existence as well. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living. But if I destroy you and your dreck script, and I still exist....then my existence will be glorious, for I will become my own master."

"Like so many experiences you venture into knowing full well that they'll be terrible, in fact the core pleasure resides in their very innate badness,..."

"I do hereby and forever abandon abandoning all hope. Honestly, I give up on giving up. I'm just not cut out to be some hopeless, disillusioned wretch with no aspirations for the rest of the eternity, sprawled catatonic in my own feces on a cold stone floor. In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple of days of hopelessness. Future scientists would call it Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case of history chasing rainbows."

"Why is it that I occur as a story to everyone except myself?"

"I hope, therefore I am."

"Being dead isn't all sitting around in remorseful reflection and bitter self-recrimination. Death, like life, is what you make of it."

"The truth is you stay in Hell until you forgive yourself."

""In Hell, it's our attachments to a fixed identity that torture us."0"

"No one is discriminated against more than alive people discriminate against the dead. Nobody is as badly marginalized. If the dead are portrayed in popular culture it's as zombies...vampires...ghosts, always something threatening to the living."

"No, it's not fair, but what makes life feel like Hell is our expectation that it should last forever. Life is short. Dead is forever. You will find out for yourself soon enough. It won't help the situation for you to get all upset."