The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.

You're getting like an attitude.  What you get put through for just wanting something more out of life.  Makes you vulnerable.  Inside, that tug of desperation, trying not to be excited, maybe this is it, and it's usually freaks and you want to shout I'm not like you.

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?  [...] Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute.  Only chance can speak to us

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.  It is wrong then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life.  For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

And therein lies the whole of man's plight.   Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line.  That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

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 comletely stock cherry, right out of a dealer's showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste. 

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 ot 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...Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered. 

Marla's philospohy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment.  The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't. 

Raymond K.K. Hessel, your dinner is going to taste better than any meal you've ever eaten, and tomorrow will the most beautiful day of your entire life.