Fight Club (novel)

"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."