"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."

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

"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?"

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"I embrace my own festering diseased corruption."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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.""

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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 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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"If only his innocence were written on a sheet of paper, he could pull it out and say, ‘Read, it’s all here,’ but since it was hidden in himself they would know it only if they sought it, and they were not seeking."

"But after the visit to the cave he had stopped thinking of relevancy, truth, or even proof. There was no ‘reason,’ there was only their plot against a Jew, any Jew; he was the accidental choice for the sacrifice. He would be tried because the accusation had been made, there didn’t have to be another reason. Being born a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors."

"There's something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property. The stink of that corruption never escapes the soul, and it is the stink of future evil. (Bibikov)"

"He tried desperately to put together a comprehensible sequence of events that had led inevitably from his departure from the shtetl to a prison cell in Kiev; but to think of all these strange and unexpected experiences as meaningfully caused by related events confused him."

"Who were they punishing if his life was punishment?"

"‘Who will help me?’ he cried out in his sleep, but the other prisoners had their own anguish, their own bad dreams."

"‘Little brother,’ he said to Yakov, making the sign of the cross over him, ‘don’t lose hope. The stones of the bridge may crumble but the truth will come out.’ ‘And till then,’ sighed the fixer, ‘what of my wasted youth?’"