"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

""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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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.""

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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?"