"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need."

"If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes."

"Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality."

"By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember."

"If you're male, and you're Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And sometimes you find your father in your career."

"That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version."

"Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?"

"At this rate, we'll never get to the future."

"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better."

"You had a near life experience."

"Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday."

"Anymore, no one's mind is their own."

"In capitalist nation, all is decided by money."

"It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget."

"His saliva tasted like the wet dicks of ten thousand lonely truck drivers."

"My secret wish is right now to be romancing this dead girl. A dead girl. Any dead girl. I'm not what you'd call choosy."

"The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage."

"The idea that I can't share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems."

"People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown."

"Could you hold the chainsaw a bit closer to your mouth, please?"

"If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?"

"You gain power by pretending to be weak."

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."

"The amazing miracle of death, when one second you're walking and talking, and the next second you're an object."

"It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities."

"Only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes."

"What makes the earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it ought to feel like Heaven."

"Since boyhood, fury had become his father. His older brother. His only protector. Fury gave him strength and courage and spurred him to always move forward despite always getting things wrong and always failing and no mentor there to help him or teach him and everyone always laughing. Anger delivered him from catastrophe. Rage kept him from going under. It had come to be his greatest asset and only strategy."

"Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club."

"We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them."

"It's amazing what a woman will read into if you by accident, say I love you. Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this."

"Only after disaster can we be resurrected."

"Aim low and you won't be disappointed."

"Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood."

"You can't fool people into loving you."

"I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing."

"Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother."

"You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling."

"Advertising has these people chassing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need. We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression."

"Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit."

"The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything."

"After long enough, everyone in the world will be you enemy."

"With a book, you're guaranteed the audience has a certain skill level and that the audience has to make an ongoing effort to consume this product and that the project is being consumed by just one person at a time. I really want to play to that strength because it's one of the few advantages books still have."

"They placed their bets with such self righteous bravado, but I'm the one who lost."

"We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.I have no native tongue."

"You know that old phrase 'Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it'? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off."

"And the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight."

"Tyler lies back and asks, "If Marilyn Monroe were alive right now, what would she be doing?"I say, goodnight.The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling and Tyler says, "Clawing at the lid of her coffin."

"You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm."

"Jack Palance was my distant uncle - that's the family gossip. Growing up, my family knew everything about his face getting burned and scarred in the military and how that mutilation led him to become such a famous 'heavy' in films. I prayed for good scars of my own. Not just acne scars."