"We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention."

"These are Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I am Tyler's mouth. I am Tyler's hands."

"Here in the bathroom with me are razor blades. Here is iodine to drink. Here are sleeping pills to swallow. You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you reenlist."

"There are worse things you can do to people you love than kill them."

"I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women."

"People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone."

"Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground."

"What if reality is nothing but some disease?"

"Help me give up my addiction to Hope."

"What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger."

"A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?""Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living."

"I still love him so much I'll hide any amount of conjugated estrogen in his food. So much I'll do anything to destroy him."

"The lucky ones are just born dead."

"My characters tend to be more dynamic because they're reaching that point in their lives where their old way of being is breaking down. They're conflicted by the idea that they don't know what's next. You could call it Kierkegaard's leap of faith, when you get tired of sort of reinventing yourself on a very superficial level."

"According lecture, entire effort United States to incite desire, inflict want, inspire demand."

"The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up."

"No, whether a woman is a concubine to fuck or a damsel to redeem, she's always just some passive object to fulfill a man's purpose."

"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."

"If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture."

"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."

"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 and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I'm wondering how clean this gun is."

"We don't see a lot of models for male social interaction. There's sports and barn raisings."

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."

"The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here."

"It sounds as if you'd like to be God."

"Why do I do anything?' she says. 'I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream."

"If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?"

"Everybody looks a little crazy if you're looking close enough and if you can't look that close, then you don't really love them."

"The club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the centre of attention but completely cut off from participating with anyone else. You're the corpse in an English murder mystery."

"Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head."

"No, we love war.War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment."It's the mark of a very, very young soul, Mr. Whittier used to say, "to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers."

"If you can change the way people think, she said.The way they see themselves.The way they see the world.If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives.And that's the only lasting thing you can create."

"They all think men are obsolete. useless. as if we're just some sexual appendix."

"Suicide is very contagious."

"I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise."

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

"Some stories, you use up. Others use you up."

"More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can't stop."

"Anything you can acquire is only another thing you'll lose."

"Someday you will die, and until you know that, you're useless to me."

"The best fights don't occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other."

"If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't."

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

"If this is death, if we are dead or dying or even if we are living and just going to die, then what do we have to fear? What are we worried about? I think the knowledge of death is freeing. That pressure we feel, the weight of life and its impending conclusion, is imaginary. And the fact that we're all in this together is unifying: there's solidarity in mortality."

"The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish."

"No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close."

"My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel."

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

"The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.'Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere."