Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

• The first step to eternal life is you have to die.
• The feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. 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.
• On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.
• Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
• If I didn't say anything, people in a group assumed the worst.
• This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.
• Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he'd created himself. 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.
• There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with. Now that she knows where we're all going, Marla feels every moment of her life.
• Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
• I just don't want to die without a few scars.
• Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
• Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.
• What Marla loves, she says, is all the things that people love intensely and then dump 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.
• Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
• If I don't fall all the way, I can't be saved.
• If you lose your nerve before you hit the bottom, you'll never really succeed.
• It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.
• Without their death, their pain, without their sacrifice we would have nothing.
• In the wild you don't see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren't meant to get old.
• If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.
• Nothing is static. Everything is falling apart.
• Maybe we should always assume the worst.
• The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.
• Not everything is about money.
• Even if they don't kill you, if someone loves you enough to take you home, they still castrate you.
• In death we become heroes.
• That old saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.
• Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.
• A moment is the most you could ever expect from perfection.
• We just are, and what happens just happens.
• Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything.

8/6/2003