“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.”

“The whole island was exactly what a kid growing up in some trailer park--say some dump like Tecumseh Lake, Georgia--would dream about. This kid would turn out all the lights in the trailer while her mom was at work. She'd lie down flat on her back, on the matted-down orange shag carpet in the living room. The carpet smelling like somebody stepped in a dog pile. The orange melted black in spots from cigarette burns. The ceiling was water-stained. she'd fold her arms across her chest, and she could picture life in this kind of place. It would be that time--late at night--when your ears reach out for any sound. When you can see more with your eyes closed than open. The fish skeleton. From the first time she held a crayon, that's what she'd draw.”

“The truth is that all this was just part of the suicide process. Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage. If a tress falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn’t it just lie there and rot? And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven This wasn’t a question of whether I was going to kill myself. This, this effort, this money and time, the writing team, the drugs, the diet, the agent, the flights of stairs going up to nowhere, all this was so I could off myself with everyone’s full attention.”

“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.”

“A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce a risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book. . . . A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read that it's difficult to call books a "mass medium." No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades.”

“She says, "Do you have any rubbers?" I say, I thought she was barren. "Sure, I'm sterile," she says, "but I've had unprotected sex with a million guys. I could have some terrible fatal disease." I say that would only be a problem if I wanted to live a lot longer. Fertility says, " That's how I feel about my giant credit card debt." So we have sex. If you could call it that.”

“Listen up. Rant would tell people: ‘You’re a different human being to everybody you meet.’Sometimes Rant said, ‘You only ever is in the eyes of other folks.’If you were going to carve a quote on his grave, his favorite saying was: ‘The future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday.”