Chuck Palahniuk

What Tyler says about the crap and the slaves of history, that's how I felt. I wanted to destroy something beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. 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.

Don't think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing.

The mechanic says, "If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?"

On a long enough time line, everyone's survival rate drops to zero.

What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand, and Tyler was sitting in the palm of a perfection he'd made himself.

And a moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.

Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.

I wanted to breathe smoke.

I wanted to burn the Louvre. I'd do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.

This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead.

I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?"

Why did I cause so much pain?

Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?

Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love?

I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong.

We are not special

We are not crap or trash either.

We just are.

We just are, and what happens just happens.

And God says, "No, that's not right

Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything.

The first time I met Tyler, I was asleep.

I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn't see any way to change things.

Only end them.

I felt trapped.

I was too complete.

I was too perfect.

And the fight goes on and on because I want to be dead. Because only in death do we have names. Only in death are we no longer part of Project Mayhem.

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil.

And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

One minute, Robert Paulson was the warm center that the light of the world crowded around, and the next moment, Robert Paulson was an object. After the police shot, the amazing miracle of death.