Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.

"Getting fired," Tyler says, "is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we'd quit treading water and do something with our lives."

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

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.

You aren't alive anywhere like you're alive at fight club. When it's you and one other guy under that one light in the middle of all those watching. Fight club isn't about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn't about words. You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There's grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn't about looking good. There's hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved.

"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 will be mistakes, and maybe the point is not to forget the rest of yourself if one little part might go bad.

If she was going to die, Marla didn't want to know about it.

Oh, the proof that one day you're thinking and hauling yourself around, and the next, you're cold fertilizer, worm buffet. This is the amazing miracle of death, and it should be so sweet if it weren't for, oh, that one.

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

This is insomnia. All night, your thoughts are on the air.
All night long, you're thinking: Am I asleep? Have I slept?

There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.

I wanted to burn the Louvre. I’d do the Elgin Marbles with a sledge-hammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.

And this week the insomnia is back. Insomnia, and now the whole world figures to stop by and take a dump on my grave.

We go upstairs to her room, and Marla tells me how in the wild you don't see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren't meant to get old.
Marla lies down on her bed and undoes the tie on her bathrobe, and says our culture has made death something wrong. Old animals should be an unnatural exception.