Chuck Palahniuk

Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer.

Tyler never knew his father.

Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected.

"It's only after you've lost everything," Tyler says, "that you're free to do anything."

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?

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

This is when I'd cry because right now, your life comes down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion.

You can swallow about a pint of blood before you're sick.

Strangers with this kind of honesty make me grow a big rubbery one, if you know what I mean.

"Sticking feathers up your butt," Tyler says, "does not make you a chicken.

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.

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.

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.

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.