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As A Culture, We Believe That If We Kill Something, We've Killed The Issue. That's Why So Many Books End With Death, Why So Many Plays End With Death, Because It's Full Resolution. I'm Always Curious To Know What Happens After Romeo And Juliet Die. In A Way, That's The Beginning Of The Story. Maybe Beyond The Story Is Even Better.

-Chuck Palahniuk

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As A Culture, We

Chuck Palahniuk

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As A Culture, We Believe That If We Kill Something, We've Killed The Issue. That's Why So Many Books End With Death, Why So Many Plays End With Death, Because It's Full Resolution. I'm Always Curious To Know What Happens After Romeo And Juliet Die. In A Way, That's The Beginning Of The Story. Maybe Beyond The Story Is Even Better.

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Disaster Is A Natural Part Of My Evolution Toward Tragedy And Dissolution.

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Fight Club Book

Fight Club Novel

I Try To Get Centered: Watching White Moon Face The Stars Never Feel Anger Blah, Blah, Blah, The End

Most Guys Will Fight To Know You. Some Guys Will Deny You're A Real Person, And Some Will Just Ignore You." The Zealot. The Atheist. The Agnostic.

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I Want Out Of The Labels. I Don't Want My Whole Life Crammed Into A Single Word. A Story. I Want To Find Something Else, Unknowable, Some Place To Be That's Not On The Map. A Real Adventure.' A Spinx. A Mystery. A Blank. Unknown. Undefined.

We Just Had A Near-life Experience!

Life Experience

By The Time You Read This, You'll Be Older Than You Remember.

Don’t Ask Me When Because I Don’t Remember, But Somewhere Along The Way I Keep Forgetting To Commit Suicide.

The Future Is Just Wasted On Some People.

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Everything Is A Self-portrait. Everything Is A Diary.

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The Problem With Every Story Is You Tell It After The Fact.

Maybe It's Just A Daughter's Job To Piss Off Her Mother.

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Jump To The Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter. Jump To The Day Another House Will Stand Here And The People Living There Won't Know We Ever Happened.

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Chasing Rainbows

Nothing Happened, And Nothing Kept Happening.

Get Married Before The Sex Gets Boring Or You'll Never Get Married.

I Write Compulsively. I've Got So Many Ideas, And I Love To Do It So Much, I Can't Not Do It. I Write The Way Some People Do Drugs.

It's Only In Drugs Or Death We'll See Anything New, And Death Is Just Too Controlling.

These Days, Most Of The People You Hear Laughing Are Dead.

We All Want To Explain Ourselves. Nobody Wants To Be Forgotten.

Part Of Her Doing Suicide Intervention Is My Caseworker Has To Mix Me Another Gin And Tonic.

No Matter How Much You Think You Love Somebody, You'll Step Back When The Pool Of Their Blood Edges Up Too Close.

A Guy's Calling To Say He's Failing Algebra Ii. Just As A Point Of Practice, I Say, Kill Yourself. A Woman Calls And Says Her Kids Won't Behave. Without Missing A Beat, I Tell Her, Kill Yourself. A Man Calls To Say His Car Won't Start. Kill Yourself. A Woman Calls To Ask What Time The Late Movie Starts. Kill Yourself. She Asks, "isn't This 555-1327? Is This The Moorehouse Cineplex? I Say, Kill Yourself. Kill Yourself. Kill Yourself.

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How Can You Possibly Believe He Really Loves You?” Miss Sneezy Looks From The Mother To The Saint To Mr. Whittier’s Hand.“you Have No Choice,” Mr. Whittier Tells Her. “if You Need To Be Loved.

You Realize You Have No Control Over How You're Perceived.

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It's Only After We've Lost Everything That We're Free To Do Anything.

The Difference Between How You Look And How You See Yourself Is Enough To Kill Most People. And Maybe The Reason Vampires Don’t Die Is Because They Can Never See Themselves In Photographs Or Mirrors.

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After A Good-looking Boy Gives You Rabies Two, Three Times, You'll Settle Down And Marry Somebody Less Exciting For The Rest Of Your Life

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Every Woman Is Just A Different Kind Of Problem.

Every Generation Wants To Be The Last. Every Generation Hates The Next Trend In Music They Can't Understand. We Hate To Give Up Those Reins Of Our Culture. To Find Our Own Music Playing In Elevators. The Ballad For Our Revolution, Turned Into Background Music For A Television Commercial. To Find Our Generation's Clothes And Hair Suddenly Retro.

Television Commercials

But If You Tell Folks You're A College Student, Folks Are So Impressed. You Can Be A Student In Anything And Not Have To Know Anything. Just Say Toxicology Or Marine Biokinesis, And The Person You're Talking To Will Change The Subject To Himself. If This Doesn't Work, Mention The Neural Synapses Of Embryonic Pigeons.

With Every Lecture, You’re Forced To Look Again At Every Choice You’ve Made Over The Lesson-by-lesson Chain Of Your Entire Life. And After All These Years, You See How Little You Have To Work With, How Limited Your Life And Education Have Been. How Scant Was Your Courage And Curiosity. Not To Mention Your Expectations.

If It Is The Case That Love Does Survive Death, Then You May Consider This To Be A Happy Ending. Boy Meets Girl. Boy Gets Girl. Happily Ever After Or Not.

With The Novels, I Usually Start From Something In My Own Life That I Can't Resolve, So I Turn It Into A Metaphor And For Months Or Sometimes Years I'll Exhaust All Of My Emotional Reaction To This Issue By Making It Enormous On The Page.

Sex Pretty Much Cures Everything.

Isn't A Kid Alive Who Doesn't Dream About Rewarding Her Folks, Or Punishing Them.

Anybody's True Nature Is Bullshit. There Is No Human Soul. Emotion Is Bullshit. Love Is Bullshit.

It's Pathetic How We Can't Live With The Things We Can't Understand. How We Need Everything Labeled And Explained And Deconstructed.

I Let Go. Lost In Oblivion. Dark And Silent And Complete. I Found Freedom. Losing All Hope Was Freedom.

The Lower You Fall, The Higher You'll Fly.

She's Not Wearing Makeup So Her Face Just Looks Like Skin.

It's Funny How You Never Think About The Women You've Had. It's Always The Ones Who Get Away That You Can't Forget.

The Same Way A Compact Disk Isn't Responsible For What's Recorded On It, That's How We Are. You're About As Free To Act As A Programmed Computer. You're About As One-of-a-kind As A Dollar Bill.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

When You Don't Share Your Problems, You Resent Hearing The Problems Of Other People.

That's What I Love About Fire, How It Would Kill Me As Quick As Anybody Else. How It Can't Know I'm Its Mother. It's So Beautiful And Powerful And Beyond Feeling Anything For Anybody, That's What I Love About Fire.

Be Famous. Be A Big Social Experiment In Getting What You Don't Want. Find Value In What We've Been Taught Is Worthless. Find Good In What The World Says Is Evil. I'm Giving You My Life Because I Want The Whole World To Know You. I Wish The Whole World Would Embrace What It Hates. Find What You're Afraid Of Most And Go Live There.

The One You Love And The One Who Loves You Are Never, Ever The Same Person.

People Had Been Working For So Many Years To Make The World A Safe Organized Place. Nobody Realized How Boring It Would Become.

The Most Boring Scenes Are The Scenes Where A Character Is Alone.

How You're Still Always Trapped. How Your Head Is The Cave, Your Eyes The Cave Mouth. How You Live Inside Your Head And Only See What You Want. How You Only Watch The Shadows And Make Up Your Own Meaning.

You Can't Be Beautiful," Brandy Says About A Thousand Times, "until You Feel Beautiful.

The Same As Real Life, There Is No Happily Ever After.

It Only Takes One Mistake And Nothing Else You Ever Do Will Matter. No Matter How Hard You Work Or How Smart You Become, You'll Always Be Known For That One Poor Choice.

No Matter How Much You Love Someone, You Still Want To Have You Own Way.

You Only Ask People About Themselves So You Can Tell Them About Yourself.

You Can’t Fool People Into Loving You.

The First Step - Especially For Young People With Energy And Drive And Talent, But Not Money - The First Step To Controlling Your World Is To Control Your Culture. To Model And Demonstrate The Kind Of World You Demand To Live In. To Write The Books. Make The Music. Shoot The Films. Paint The Art.

You Had To Risk Your Life To Get Love. You Had To Get Right To The Edge Of Death To Ever Be Saved.

Ideas Come At Any Moment -- Except When You Demand Them. Most Ideas Come While I'm Physically Active, At The Gym, With Friends, Gardening, So I Always Carry Pen And Paper. My First Draft Is Always Written In Longhand. But Once The First Dozen Chapters, More Like Short Stories, Are Written, Then Momentum Builds Until I Can't Leave The Project Until It's Done.

All The Effort In The World Won't Matter If You're Not Inspired.

Inspirational Life

There's No Way You Can Get The Past Right. You Can Pretend. You Can Delude Yourself, But You Can't Re-create What's Over.

Someone Bent On Suicide Won't Have Much Sense Of Humor Left.

Fathers. Mothers. With All Their Caring And Attention. They Will Fuck You Up, Every Time.

Fertility Says, "can You Relax And Just Let Things Happen?" I Ask, Does She Mean, Like Disasters, Like Pain, Like Misery? Can I Just Let All That Happen? "and Joy," She Says, "and Serenity, And Happiness, And Contentment." She Says All The Wings Of The Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "you Don't Have To Control Everything," She Says. "you Can't Control Everything." But You Can Be Ready For Disaster. A Sign Goes By Saying, Buckle Up. "if You Worry About Disaster All Of The Time, That's What You Are Going To Get," Fertility Says.

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Where Every Day Doesn't Start With An Alarm Clock And End With The Television.

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What You See At Fight Club Is A Generation Of Men Raised By Women.

The World Will Always Punish The Few People With Special Talents The Rest Of Us Don’t Recognize As Real.

If A Tree Falls In The Forest And Nobody Is There To Hear It, Doesn't It Just Lie There And Rot?

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An Important Part Of Building A New Culture Was Allowing People To Complain About Their Past. At First, The More They Complained, The Worse The Past Would Seem. But By Venting, People Could Start To Resolve The Past. By Bitching And Bitching And Bitching, They Could Exhaust The Drama Of Their Own Horror Stories. Grow Bored. Only Then Could They Accept A New Story For Their Lives. Move Forward.

Where I'm Is One Of Those Stair Climbing Machines The Agent Has Installed. You Climb And Climb Forever And Never Get Off The Ground. You're Trapped In Your Hotel Room. It's The Mystical Sweat Love Lodge Experience Of Our Time, The Only Sort Of Indian Vision Quest We Can Schedule Into Our Daily Planner.our Stair Master To Heaven.

In Light This Bright, After So Long In The Dark, Everything We Can See Is Only Black And White. Only Glaring Shape-outlines We Have To Blink Against.

Black And White

Love Is Bullshit. Emotion Is Bullshit.

As An Artist You Organize Your Life So That You Get A Chance To Paint, A Window Of Time, But That's No Guarantee You'll Create Anything Worth All Your Effort. You're Always Haunt By The Idea You're Wasting Your Life.

Some Of Us Are Lucky Enough To Fall In Love Once Or Twice But The Luckiest Of Us Are Those Who Find That Someone They Simply Can't Live Without And Have The Pleasure Of Falling In Love With Them Day In And Day Out For The Rest Of Their Lives. Relationships Aren't About Simply Falling In Love Once And Being Done With It, They're About Loving Someone Until The End Of Your Days And Growing That Love Endlessly.

Falling In Love

For The Record, Knowing When People Are Only Pretending To Like You Isn't Such A Great Skill To Have.

Really, Just Looking Around, You Feel A Twinge Of Pity For The Poor Souls Who Succeeded In Getting Past The Pearly Gates. One Can't Help But Picture The Lackluster Vip Lounge In Heaven, A Kind Of Nonalcoholic Ice-cream Social Starring Harriet Beecher Stowe And Mahatma Gandhi. Hardly Anyone's Idea Of A "with-it" Social Register.

More Than One Side? You're Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Jackass!

I Try To Tell A Story The Way Someone Would Tell You A Story In A Bar, With The Same Kind Of Timing And Pacing.

As We Grow Older I Always Think, Why Didn't I Do More When I Was Young, Why Didn't I Risk More?

We've All Been Raised On Television To Believe That One Day We'd All Be Millionaires, And Movie Gods, And Rock Stars. But We Won't. And We're Slowly Learning That Fact. And We're Very, Very Pissed Off.

I'm Giving You My Life To Prove To Myself I Can, I Really Can Love Somebody. Even When I'm Not Getting Paid, I Can Give Love And Happiness And Charm. You See, I Can Handle The Baby Food And The Not Talking And Being Homeless And Invisible, But I Have To Know That I Can Love Somebody. Completely And Totally, Permanently And Without Hope Of Reward, Just As An Act Of Will, I Will Love Somebody.

A Knife, It Felt Like A Knife, And I'd Discovered That Despite Everything That's Happened, I Still Had An Endless Untapped Potential For Getting Hurt.

Untapped Potential

I Wanted To Write About The Moment When Your Addictions No Longer Hide The Truth From You. When Your Whole Life Breaks Down. That's The Moment When You Have To Somehow Choose What Your Life Is Going To Be About.

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John Jay Chapman

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