The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.
What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.
You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.
If you love something set it free, but don’t be surprised if it comes back with herpes.
Ok. You fuck me, then snub me. You love me, you hate me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is this a pretty accurate description of our relationship.
No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
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.
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you’re loving somebody when you’re just using them. This only looks like love.
No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way.
Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn’t bother to torture you if she didn’t.
It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.
Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit. I am a rock. A jerk. I’m an uncaring asshole and proud of it.
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.
You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.
At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
It can only take a moment to waste the rest of your life.
What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.
You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm.
After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.
Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.
The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don’t participate.
You had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.
My point is, that if I’m honest, my life is all about me.
Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken!
Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you.
Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight. Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.
The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don’t know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.
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.
If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?’Clawing at the roof of her coffin.
Could you hold the chainsaw a bit closer to your mouth, please?
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.
This is your life, and its ending one minute at a time.
Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn’t glitter and shine.
The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.
You can tell people the truth, but they’ll never believe you until the event. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.
Maybe the truth is I really want to like you instead.
It’s exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth.
Because supposedly those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up. The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God. As if everything’s just fine.
Parents are like God because you wanna know they’re out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.
If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
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.
It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
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.
Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy.
If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character…Would you slow down? Or speed up?
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.
Reality means you live until you die…the real truth is nobody wants reality.
It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.
Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains.
There’s still a thousand places I haven’t gone to die.
The amazing miracle of death, when one second you’re walking and talking, and the next second you’re an object.
Someday you will die, and until you know that, you’re useless to me.
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.
The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life.Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.
If she was going to die, Marla didn’t want to know about it.
Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born.
What’s up with you? How come you’re being like this?’ Because it’s the truth. This is the world we live in.
Le stelle in cieloNon conoscono l’iraBla, bla, bla, fine
What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.
All the effort in the world won’t matter if you’re not inspired.
That’s the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community
Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
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.
Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life.
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.
By the time you’re thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.
After long enough, everyone in the world will be you enemy.
This would be…a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.
Therefore, when we neglect to fear such a brittle monstrosity, we render it powerless.
It’s not love or anything, but I think I like you, too.
There are worse things you can do to people you love than kill them.
The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.
We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them.
Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.
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.
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.
There are lot of things we don’t want to know about the people we love.
It’s all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.
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.
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.
It’s all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power, the same way money is power, the same way a gun is power.
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.
These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.
Prepare to evacuate soul in five, in four, three, two, one.
It’s easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It’s a lot more difficult to perform one.
As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that’s no guarantee you’ll create anything worth all your effort. You’re always haunt by the idea you’re wasting your life.
It’s funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself.
they should let some people into the library by prescription only
We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.
Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.
Maybe it’s just a daughter’s job to piss off her mother.
We’ve taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.
Real smart begins when you quit quoting other people.
We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
I hate how I don’t feel real enough unless people are watching.
We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them.
Good news didn’t seem real until you’d told at least a dozen friends.
It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we don’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it’s for sure unexplainable. Even God.
For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose … watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh.
My first time I jacked off, I thought I’d invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.
I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut hosing orgasm.
A woman eats to feed her pussy.” Meaning: Anything we do to excess is in compensation for not getting a minimum amount of sexual gratification.
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.
I was very invested in love but it was just this long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it’s about getting off.
Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home… it’s your responsibility to love it, or change it.
Isn’t a kid alive who doesn’t dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.
Kids grow up connected to nothing these days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people.
No, it’s not fair, but what makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. It won’t help the situation for you to get all upset.
Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.
They placed their bets with such self righteous bravado, but I’m the one who lost.
The only way that America can protect its prosperity and political stability will be to depopulate the Third World? Should we be surprised that the AIDS virus showed up about 1975? Do you understand what the term “depopulate” means?
Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you’d been reading.
Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that’s when we can start talking about equal rights.
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.
If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.
When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?
People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.
The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same future you had, yesterday.
You can tell people the truth, but they’ll never believe until the event. Until it’s too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble
In a world where vows are worthless.Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.
Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth. I used to be such a nice person.
These are Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth. I am Tyler’s mouth. I am Tyler’s hands.
It sounds trite, but only because words make everything true sound trite. Because words always screw up what you’re trying to say.
We’re living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we’re left with this cluttered world of language.
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 the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.
It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.
Anything you can acquire is only another thing you’ll lose
Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn’t pretty and perfect. You can’t put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.
Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends.
they all think men are obsolete. useless. as if we’re just some sexual appendix.
I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn’t born, he’s made, and more and more of them are being made by women.
She kept hoping that something would happen to rescue her from her own small-scale, predictable dreams.
He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.
I am the cause of all my upsets. I am my worst enemy.
Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.
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.
There’s no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can’t re-create what’s over.
You’d be surprised just how fast you can close the door on your past. Learn needlepoint. Make a stained-glass lamp.
The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture.
Your past is just a story. And once you realise this, it has no power over you.
Humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.
The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.
Put the gun to my head and paint walls with my brains.
I refuse to give readers an uplifting faux experience engineered to comfort them and perpetuate the sociopolitical and economic status quo.””Who died and made you Bertolt Brecht?
Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.
Where would Jesus be if no one ever wrote the gospels?
History is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.
It’s my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.
Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.
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.
And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that’s a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.
We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.
When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.
Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer . . . or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded–the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty. [ellipses original]
You can tell people the truth, but they’ll never believe you until the event. Until it’s too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble. So you just walk home.
It’s okay if there isn’t a God anymore, but I still want to respect something. I don’t want to be the center of my own universe,
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.
You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.
What’s burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It’s a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren’t we all?
I’m an invisible monster. I’m incapable of loving anybody. You don’t know which is worse.
Most times, it’s just a lot easier not to let the world know what’s wrong.
The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.
The idea that I can’t share my problems with other people makes me not give a shit about their problems.
You only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.
Anybody’s true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit.
Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.
A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.
As human beings, our first commandment is:Something needs to happen
[W]hat makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven.
You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. Every time you don’t throw yourself down the stairs, that’s a choice. Every time you don’t crash your car, you re-enlist.
The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don’t be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.
You have to give up! you have to give up!You have to realize that someday you will die,Until you know that, you are useless!
According lecture, entire effort United States to incite desire, inflict want, inspire demand.
We live and we die and anything else is just a delusion.
… the first step to eternal live is you have to die.
Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground.
You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth.
Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.
For years now, I’ve wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.
Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia.
And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage.
HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it’s so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.
Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home… it’s your responsibility to love it, or change it.
What makes the earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it ought to feel like Heaven.
…,dying seems like the greatest weakness, and in a world where people say you’re lazy for not shaving your legs, then being dead seems like the ultimate character flaw. Chapter I.
Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It’s because they know what it’s like to be treated like an animal.
Fathers. Mothers. With all their caring and attention. They will f— you up, every time.
By the time you read this, you’ll be older than you remember.
First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.
No, I say, it’s fine.Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains. Just great, I say. Really.
The same way a compact disk isn’t responsible for what’s recorded on it, that’s how we are. You’re about as free to act as a programmed computer. You’re about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill
That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can’t control life, at least you can control your version.
Everybody’s trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.
If you don’t know what you want,” the doorman said, “you end up with a lot you don’t.
Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let… lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
And the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.
Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I’m wondering how clean this gun is.
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.
your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it’s all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.
My stomach hurts, but if it’s guilt or impacted stool, I can’t tell. Either way, I’m so full of shit.
In a way, being an addict is very proactive. A good addiction takes the guesswork out of death. There is such a thing as planning your getaway.
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.
Every garden looks beautiful in May.’ Meaning: Everyone is somewhat attractive when she’s young.
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.
You young people, you who think you invented fun and drugs, fuck you
They’d told him he had talent. That word was heroin to the young. Talent
His saliva tasted like the wet dicks of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.
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.
Give me lust, baby.Flash.Give me malice.Flash.Give me detached existentialist ennui.Flash.Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.Flash.
The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.
I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can’t live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.
And it’s funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people.
Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?
Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher.
We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. it’s just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There’s just decisions and disease and death.
After fight club you’re so relaxed, you just cannot care.
More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can’t stop.
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.
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you’re loving somebody when you’re just using them.
He was the kind of boy any young girl should date while she’s still able to recover.
Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here.
If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
That’s pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our attention. Jacking off. Denial.
To both my parents, the world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard.
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.
You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.
We are God’s middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.
On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Everyone wants to feel special – attain a special status among their pears- but not too special. Most kids want to be special the same way their friends are
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn’t it just lie there and rot?
Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
We don’t see a lot of models for male social interaction. There’s sports and barn raisings.
If nothing else, there’s comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.
What is the real purpose behind the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus? They seem like greater steps toward faith and imagination, each with a payoff. Like cognitive training exercises.
Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.
When working, my diet degrades to pizza three times a day, because I don’t want to distract myself from anything.
I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That’s the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.
My favorite books to give or get are short story collections. And always paperbacks because they are easy to carry as you travel.
We’re so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior.
Of the big horror movies of the ’70s, you have ‘The Omen,’ ‘The Sentinel,’ ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ ‘The Stepford Wives,’ ‘Burnt Offerings’ – these are all romantic fatalist movies where there’s a sort of glimmer of hope… but darkness wins.
The best fights don’t occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.
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.
A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.
I’m always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point, but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity.
Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that’s usually how you end up crying?
When I first started writing, it was me alone with a computer in my apartment. I hated the time away from other people, and my writing sucked. Now I have a laptop; I can do the most tedious part of my job in a public place.
People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.
The most boring scenes are the scenes where a character is alone.
My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?