Fight Club

by Chuck Palahniuk

the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

We have sort of a triangle thing going here. I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me.

It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.

I wanted red-and-blue Tuinal bullet capsules, lipstick-red Seconals.

Losing all hope was freedom.

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

Oh, the proof that one day you’re thinking and hauling yourself around, and the next, you’re cold fertilizer, worm buffet.

Her pulse a siren overhead, announcing: Prepare for death in ten, in nine, in eight seconds. Death will commence in seven, six …

Prepare to evacuate soul in ten, in nine, eight.

Death to commence in three, in two. Moonlight shines in through the open mouth. Prepare for the last breath, now. Evacuate. Now. Soul clear of body.

Okay in that brainy brain-food philosophy way, we’re all dying, but Marla isn’t dying the way Chloe was dying.

“Funerals are all abstract ceremony. Here, you have a real experience of death.”

The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.

It took my whole life to buy this stuff.

Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food.

“A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many things,”

“Young people, they think they want the whole world.”

Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art.

The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club. I tell Walter I fell. I did this to myself.

I just don’t want to die without a few scars, I say. It’s nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of a dealer’s showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste.

Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

we were still alive and wanted to see how far we could take this thing and still be alive.

How could I compete for Tyler’s attention. I am Joe’s Enraged, Inflamed Sense of Rejection.

“The girl in 8G has no faith in herself,” Marla shouts, “and she’s worried that as she grows older, she’ll have fewer and fewer options.”

When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone’s hostile little FACE.

Me, with my punched-out eyes and dried blood in big black crusty stains on my pants, I’m saying HELLO to everybody at work. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it’s so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.

Marla twists the cigarette into the soft white belly of her arm. “Burn, witch, burn.”

What Marla loves, she says, is all the things that people love intensely and then dump an hour or a day after.

Tyler says I’m nowhere near hitting the bottom, yet. And if I don’t fall all the way, I can’t be saved. Jesus did it with his crucifixion thing. I shouldn’t just abandon money and property and knowledge. This isn’t just a weekend retreat. I should run from self-improvement, and I should be running toward disaster. I can’t just play it safe anymore. This isn’t a seminar.

You’re the corpse in an English murder mystery.

I am Joe’s Blood-Boiling Rage.

The insomnia distance of everything, a copy of a copy of a copy. You can’t touch anything, and nothing can touch you.

my thoughts are a tornado in my head. This is insomnia. All night, your thoughts are on the air. All night long, you’re thinking: Am I asleep? Have I slept?

Sunday morning, we come home beat up and sleep all afternoon.

how I once had cancer for ten minutes, worse than cancer.

Marla isn’t laughing. I want to make her laugh, to warm her up. To make her forgive me for the collagen, I want to tell Marla there’s nothing for me to find. If she found anything this morning, it was a mistake. A birthmark.

My fear is that people will see my foot and I’ll start to die in their minds. The cancer I don’t have is everywhere now.

Marla started going to the support groups since it was easier to be around other human butt wipe. Everyone has something wrong. And for a while, her heart just sort of flatlined.

only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.”

Tyler and I were looking more and more like identical twins. Both of us had punched-out cheekbones, and our skin had lost its memory, and forgot where to slide back to after we were hit.

Arson meets on Monday. Assault on Tuesday. Mischief meets on Wednesday. And Misinformation meets on Thursday. Organized Chaos. The Bureaucracy of Anarchy. You figure it out. Support groups. Sort of.

The idea is to take some Joe on the street who’s never been in a fight and recruit him. Let him experience winning for the first time in his life. Get him to explode. Give him permission to beat the crap out of you.

The third rule in Project Mayhem is no excuses.

The fourth rule is no lies.

When Tyler invented Project Mayhem, Tyler said the goal of Project Mayhem had nothing to do with other people. Tyler didn’t care if other people got hurt or not. The goal was to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world. It was at fight club that Tyler invented Project Mayhem.

You can build up a tolerance to fighting, and maybe I needed to move on to something bigger. It was that morning, Tyler invented Project Mayhem.

I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.

“Recycling and speed limits are bullshit,” Tyler said. “They’re like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.”