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I Tagged A First-timer One Night At Fight Club. That Saturday Night, A Young Guy With An Angel’s Face Came To His First Fight Club, And I Tagged Him For A Fight. That’s The Rule. If It’s Your First Night In Fight Club, You Have To Fight. I Knew That So I Tagged Him Because The Insomnia Was On Again, And I Was In A Mood To Destroy Something Beautiful.

-Chuck Palahniuk

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I Tagged A First-timer

Chuck Palahniuk

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I Tagged A First-timer One Night At Fight Club. That Saturday Night, A Young Guy With An Angel’s Face Came To His First Fight Club, And I Tagged Him For A Fight. That’s The Rule. If It’s Your First Night In Fight Club, You Have To Fight. I Knew That So I Tagged Him Because The Insomnia Was On Again, And I Was In A Mood To Destroy Something Beautiful.

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I Think We're In An Age Starved For Genuine Experiences, Instead Of Cathartic Phony Experiences Through The Media, Structured, Engineered Experiences. And Those Are The Fast Food, The Masturbation Of Experience. They Don't Really Exhaust Any Aspect Of Ourselves; They Don't Make Us Any Stronger.

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I'm Always Identifying Some Fallacy In My Own Life. I'm Sort Of Making Fun Of Myself By Exploring And Unpacking Just Why I'm Sort Of Automatically Thrown To Be A Certain Way.

Since We Do Operate In A Binary World, If There's Something That Cannot Be This Or That, It Drives Us Crazy.

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She's So Thin She's Either Dying Or Rich.

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Besides, It Happens Fast For Some People And Slow For Some, Accidents Or Gravity, But We All End Up Mutilated.

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Narrator: You Had To Give It To Him: He Had A Plan. And It Started To Make Sense, In A Tyler Sort Of Way. No Fear. No Distractions. The Ability To Let That Which Does Not Matter Truly Slide.

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These Distraction-oholics. These Focus-ophobics.

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When I First Started Writing, There Was No Way I'd Write A Sex Scene. That Just Seemed Impossible. That's Why In "fight Club" All The Sex Happens Off-screen. It's All Just A Noise On The Other Side Of The Wall Or The Ceiling. I Just Couldn't Bring To Write In A Scene Like That. So One Of The Challenges With "choke" Was I Wanted To Write Sex Scenes Until I Was Really Comfortable Just Writing Them In A Very Mechanical Way.

Just For The Record, How I Feel Right Now Is Very Terrific.

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.

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.

You Can Spend Your Whole Life Building A Wall Of Facts Between You And Anything Real.

Beginning With Santa In Infancy, And Ending With The Tooth Fairy As The Child Acquires Adult Teeth. Or, Plainly Put, Beginning With All The Possibility Of Childhood, And Ending With An Absolute Trust In The National Currency.

The Answer Is There Is No Answer.

Everybody's Still Miserable In The Same Way They've Always Been Miserable, And More And More Of My Friends - Especially My Male Friends - Find Themselves Taking Anti-anxiety, Psychotropic Drugs. It Seems Like Everybody I Know Is Wondering If They're Really Who They Are, Or Once The Prescription Runs Out, Will They Become Someone Different?

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.

People Don't Listen, They Just Wait For Their Turn To Talk.

On A Long Enough Time Line, The Survival Rate For Everyone Drops To Zero.

You Could Stab A Knife Right Through My Heart And You'd Be Too Late.

It's Okay To Cry As Long As You're Faking It.

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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Steve Guttenberg

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