"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

""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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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"

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

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

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

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

"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..."

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

"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"

"Chapter 19, Absolution"