"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. ""

"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?"

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

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

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

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

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

"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.""

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

"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.""

""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"

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

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

"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."

"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."

""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."

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

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

"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"

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

"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."

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

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

"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.""

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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?"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"I embrace my own festering diseased corruption."

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