creative [kree-ey-tiv]: adjective. Synonyms: clever, cool, innovative, inspired, prolific, stimulating.

criticism [krit-uh-siz-uhm]: noun. The act of passing judgment as to the merits of anything.

30 Apr 2010

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

Everyone knows its first rule. But I will talk about Fight Club (how rebellious and suicidal of me!). This 218-page novel (if you count the afterword; it's only 208 pages if you don't) with a very annoyingly striped cover is full of quotable lines. Here are 21 such quotes, lifted from the first 21 chapters:

  1. With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the fun between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels.
  2. This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.
  3. A single frame in a movie is on the screen for one-sixtieth of a second. Divide a second into sixty equal parts. That's how long the erection is. Towering four stories tall over the popcorn auditorium, slippery red and terrible, and no one sees it.
  4. She isn't dying. Okay in that brainy brain-food philosophical way, we're all dying, but Marla isn't dying the way Chloe was dying.
  5. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
  6. You can swallow about a pint of blood before you're sick.
  7. I am Joe's Clenching bowels.
  8. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.
  9. Think about the monkeys shot into space.
  10. The perfume, all those dead whales in the cuts in her hands, it stings.
  11. the club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the center of attention but completely cut off from participating with anyone else. You're the corpse in an English murder mystery.
  12. My boss stands too close to my desk with his little smile, his lips together and stretched thin, his crotch at my elbow.
  13. On the sticky paper next to my bare ass was a Polaroid picture of my foot that no one wanted.
  14. I told the detective that it was the refrigerator that blew up the condo.
  15. I punch myself, again.
  16. Arson meets on Monday. Assault on Tuesday. Mischief meets on Wednesday. And Misinformation meets on Thursday. Organized Chaos. The Bureaucracy of Anarchy. You figure it out.
  17. "Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing."
  18. We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.
  19. Our goal is the big red bags of liposuctioned fat we'll haul back to Paper Street and render and mix with lye and rosemary and sell back to the very people who paid to have it sucked out.
  20. I have your license. I know who you are. I know where you live. I'm keeping your license, and I'm going to check on you
  21. I stick my finger through the hole in my cheek and wiggle the finger around.
I haven't included quote from chapters 22-30 because they are spoiler-riffic. 
Frankly, I don't know what I think about this book. The first two-thirds of the story weren't that great, but then came a TWIST and I couldn't stop reading until the end. And that's pretty much the only thing that made this book memorable; apart from the whole soap-from-fat-from-liposuctions thing.

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