Chuck Palahniuk

“Burn the Louvre, and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.”

“Amber saw getting infected as the ultimate commitment. Like her and the guy would be doomed to be with each other. Looking back, she figured a brush with death would make her really enjoy her life. Like she would feel more alive.”

“You see, life only turns out good or bad for only a little bit. And then it turns out some other way.”

“Rant Casey used to say, "No matter what happens, it's always now..." Talk about cryptic.I think what Rant meant was, we live in the present moment of reality, and no matter what's come before, no matter how much we loved a person or a dog, when it attacks us we'll react to that moment of danger.”

“You kill strangers deliberately so you don't accidentally kill the people you love.”

“I might be a touch of a sadist and a little bit jejune... but at least I'm not a victim, not any longer. I hope. I hope, therefore I am.”

“The greatest weapon any warrior can carry into battle is absolute certainty of her eternal soul.”

“The truth is, Archer tells me, you stay in Hell until you forgive yourself. "You fucked up. Game over," he says, "so just relax.”

“It's not true that your life flashes before your eyes when you die. At least, not all of it. Some of your life might flash. Other portions of your life it might take you years and years to recall. That, I think, is the function of Hell: It's a place of remembering. Beyond that, the purpose of Hell is not so much to forget the details of our lives as it is to forgive them.”

“If you believe Leondard, this is how Hell breaks people down -- by permitting them to act out to greater and greater extremes, becoming vicious caricatures of themselves, earning fewer and fewer rewards, until they finally realize their folly. Perhaps, I muse over the telephone, that is the one effective lesson which one learns in Hell.”

“In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness. Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows.”

“According to Babette, 98.3 percent of lawyers end up in Hell. That's in contrast to the 23 percent of farmers who are eternally damned. Some 45 percent of retail business owners are Hellbound, and 85 percent of computer software writers. Perhaps a trace number of politicians ascend to Heaven, but statistically speaking, 100 percent of them are cast into the fiery pit. As are essentially 100 percent of journalists and redheads.”

“My parents meant well, but the road to Hell is paved with publicity stunts.”

“No one sleeps in Hell except as a possible defensive posture in retaliation during yet another punitive presentation of The English Patient.”

“I know that when a supersexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smoky eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's a kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive "let them eat cake" type of chauvinism.”

“Anyone who's ever flown London to Sydney, seated next to or anywhere in the proximity of a fussy baby, you'll no doubt fall right into the swing of things in Hell. What with the strangers and crowding and seemingly endless hours of waiting for nothing to happen, for you Hell will feel like one long, nostalgic hit a deja vu. Especially if your in-flight movie was The English Patient. In Hell, whenever the demons announce they're going to treat everyone to a big-name Hollywood movie, don't get too excited because it's always The English Patient, or, unfortunately, The Piano. It's never The Breakfast Club.”

“Music is crucial... Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising along in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you - do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, close-out, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?”

“You wake up, and you’re nowhere.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.You wake up, and that’s enough.”

“A thud, and the second wheel hits the tarmac. The staccato of a hundred seat-belt buckles snapping open, and the single-use friend you almost died sitting next to says:I hope you make your connection.Yeah, me too.And this is how long your moment lasted. And life goes on.”

“You wake up at SeaTac.I study the people on the laminated airline seat card. A woman floats in the ocean, her brown hair spread out behind her, her seat cushion clutched to her chest. The eyes are wide open, but the woman doesn’t smile or frown. In another picture, people calm as Hindu cows reach up from their seats toward oxygen masks sprung out of the ceiling.This must be an emergency.Oh.”

“Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle,” Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside. This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don’t. And every year it burns, there’s more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve. Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year. The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What’s left of them...“When you think about it from a native plant perspective,” Oyster says, “Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist.” Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox.”

“Bu ömür boyu sahip olduğum altı yüz kırk birinci balık. Tanrı'nın yarattığı başka bir canlıya bakmayı ve sevmeyi öğrenmem için ailem yıllar önce ilk balığımı almıştı. Sahip olduğum altı yüz kırk balıktan sonra öğrendiğim tek şey, insanın sevdiği her şeyin bir gün öleceği oldu. O özel kişiyle karşılaştığın ilk anda, onun bir gün ölüp toprağın altına gireceğine emin olabilirsin......Gerçek, parlayıp ışık saçmaz. ...Öyle sıkıcı işler vardı ki, çalışmamak için insan kendini sakat bırakabilirdi. ...Zamanın sınırlı olduğu, kanunlar ve emirlerle dolu ve mülkiyete dayalı bu dünyada insanların yaşayabilecekleri tek gerçek macera uyuşturucu. ...Birinin zayıf olduğunu hayal etmek, onun güçlü olduğuna inanmaktan çok daha kolay. ...”

“I asked if Tyler was an artist. Tyler shrugged...What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. . . he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler sat in the palm of a perfection he'd created himself. 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.”

“A shadowof a reflectionof an imageof an illusion.”

“Days she's wasted locked up here in this room, and nothing she's done is half as good as the sketch of a chair she did while shitting her pants.”

“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.”

“Reread that Bronte book all you want, but Jane Eyre's never going to get gender-reassignment surgery or train to become a kick-ass ninja assassin.”

“Your past is just a story. And once you realize this it has no power over you.”

“the disinhibition caused by said brain damage, can also spur the infected individual to seek the pleasure of compulsive, casual sexual activity”

“the supreme manifestation of all his self-perceived shortcomings”

“trichloroethane [...] All my extensive testing has shown this to be the best treatment for a dangerous excess of human knowledge”

“they should let some people into the library by prescription only”

“they all think men are obsolete. useless. as if we're just some sexual appendix.”

“this isn't so much romance as it is opportunity [victor mancini]”

“Deliver me from Swedish furniture.Deliver me from clever art.And the phone rang and Tyler answered."If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't."May I never be complete.May I never be content.May I never be perfect.Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.”

“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.”

“That Saturday night, a young guy with an angel’s face came to his first fight club, and I tagged him for a fight. I was in a mood to destroy something beautiful . . . Tyler told me later that he'd never seen me destroy something so completely.”

“Me, while I'm heading west, asleep at Mach 0.83, or 455 miles an hour, or true airspeed, the FBI is bomb-squading my suitcase on a vacated runway back in Dulles. Nine out of ten times, the security task force guy says, the vibration is an electric razor. The other time, it's a vibrating dildo.Imagine, the task force guy says, telling a passenger on arrival that a dildo kept her baggage on the East Coast. Sometimes it's even a man. It's airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. Use the indefinite article.A dildo.Never your dildo.Never say the dildo accidentally turned itself on.A dildo activated itself and created an emergency situation that required the evacuating of your baggage.”

“If I turn up suicided in the morning, it was murder.”

“I am helpless.I am stupid, and all I do is want and need things.My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it "Entourage."This is how bad your life can get.”

“Then you're trapped on your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”

“People in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: esprit d'Escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer but it's too late. So you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So, under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party . . .As you start down the stairway, then - magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put down. That's the Spirit of the Stairway.”

“It's one thing for my parents to behave all secular humanist and gamble with their own eternal souls; however it's altogether not all right that they also gambled with mine: They placed their bets with such self-rightous bravado, but I'm the one who lost.”

“When you're dead probably not even homeless people and retarded people will want to trade you places.”

“The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our heads says, "I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew." Meaning: I may be me- but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU.”

“The martyrdom of me.”

“Just let your hand drop; and let fate decide for you.”

“There's still a thousand places I haven't gone to die.”

“The same as real life, there is no happily ever after.”

“Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit.”