“The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God’s most selfish children would steal God’s greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.Only God has the right to surprise His children with death.”

“What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.”

“These dudes, clutching their little gifts, for them today is their kind-of-honeymoon.”

“Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.”

“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.”

“If God is love, if God is gift given eternally, then our participation in the life of God happens not by escaping our everyday world, but by entering more deeply into the life of love and that paradoxical logic of gift in that we receive most richly only when we make "gifting" others a way of life.”

“How Tyler saw it was that getting God's attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe God's hate is better than His indifference.If you could be either God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.Unless we get God's attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption. Which is worse, hell or nothing?Only if we're caught and punished can we be saved.”