Fight Club

by Chuck Palahniuk

It’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.

“You justify anarchy,” Tyler says. “You f...

Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can make som...

This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and right-away destruction of civilization.

Arson. Assault. Mischief and Misinformation. No questions. No questions. No excuses and no lies. The fifth rule about Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler.

This is how Buddhist temples have tested applicants going back for bah-zillion years, Tyler says. You tell the applicant to go away, and if his resolve is so strong that he waits at the entrance without food or shelter or encouragement for three days, then and only then can he enter and begin the training.

“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”

I’m best buddies with Tyler.

See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.

Skinny guys, they never go limp. They fight until they’re burger. White guys like skeletons dipped in yellow wax with tattoos, black men like dried meat, these guys usually hang together, the way you can picture them at Narcotics Anonymous. They never say, stop. It’s like they’re all energy, shaking so fast they blur around the edges, these guys in recovery from something. As if the only choice they have left is how they’re going to die and they want to die in a fight.

getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God’s hate is better than His indifference.

Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved.

The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.

“We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.

“We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them.

There are guys with sideways noses, and these guys at the bar see me with the puckered hole in my cheek and we’re an instant family.

If you can wake up in a different place. If you can wake up in a different time. Why can’t you wake up as a different person?

After three o’clock in the morning in a motel bed in Seattle, it’s too late for you to find a cancer support group. Too late to find some little blue Amytal Sodium capsules or lipstick-red Seconals, the whole Valley of the Dolls playset. After three in the morning, you can’t get into a fight club.

“There isn’t a me and a you, anymore,” Tyler says, and he pinches the end of my nose. “I think you’ve figured that out.” We both use the same body, but at different times.

Long story short, when you’re awake, you have the control, and you can call yourself anything you want, but the second you fall asleep, I take over, and you become Tyler Durden.”

But we fought, I say. The night we invented fight club. “You weren’t really fighting me,” Tyler says. “You said so yourself. You were fighting everything you hate in your life.” But I can see you. “You’re asleep.”

I was here first. Tyler says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, well let’s just see who’s here last.”

Every planet will take on the corporate identity of whoever rapes it first.

The first time I met Tyler, I was asleep. I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things. Only end them. I felt trapped. I was too complete. I was too perfect. I wanted a way out of my tiny life.

Only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes.

The nouvelle cuisine of anarchy.

The problem is, I sort of liked my boss. If you’re male, and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And sometimes you find your father in your career.

An overdose shot of sodium phenobarbital, and then the big sleep. Valley of the Dogs style.

Tyler and I just happen to have the same fingerprints, but no one understands.

Tyler Durden the great, who was perfect for one moment, and who said that a moment is the most you could ever expect from perfection.

This is like a total epiphany moment for me. I’m not killing myself, I yell. I’m killing Tyler. I am Joe’s Hard Drive. I remember everything.

I figured that you could do anything in your private life if it left you so bruised that no one would want to know the details.

Once, a friend worried these stories might prompt people to copycat, and I insisted that we were just blue-collar nobodies living in Oregon with public school educations. There was nothing we could imagine that a million people weren’t already doing.

On a plane back to Portland, an airline flight attendant leaned close and asked me to tell him the truth. His theory was the book wasn’t really about fighting at all. He insisted it was really about gay men watching one another fuck in public steambaths. I told him, yeah, what the hell. And he gave me free drinks for the rest of the flight.

Being tired isn’t the same as being rich, but most times it’s close enough.