Chuck Palahniuk

"Getting fired," Tyler says, "is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we'd quit treading water and do something with our lives."

"You have to see, Tyler says,"how the first soap was made of heroes."

Think about the animals used in product testing.

Think about the monkeys shot into space.

"Without their death, their pain, without their sacrifice,: Tyler says, "we would have nothing."

This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.

This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact I was breathing.

Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered.

What Marla loves, she says, is all the things that people love intensely and then dump in 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. You see those trees and think of roadkill animals or sex crime victims wearing their underwear inside out and bound with black electrical tape.

"I embrace my own festering diseased corruption."

"The liberator who destroys my property," Tyler said, "is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free."

Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.

"You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger."

It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.