“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. The right set of dishes. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you” (44).
“Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need. ‘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” (149).
There is so much in this book that deals with the material world and how materialistic we are. I loved the way this quote tackles the idea of the ‘stuff’ that we have. There was so much in this story about consumerism and materialism and it really made me rethink the stuff I own and how I chose to live my life. It made me realize how little I actually have to lose and how little the things I own mean to me. When the narrator’s condo exploded and he lost everything he had ever owned, and had worked hard to get, I thought about how I would feel if I lost everything I owned. I realized how easily replaceable so much of what I own is.
“The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club” (48).
The most famous quote from the book. People everywhere seem to know this quote. I found it ironic in the book because even though this was the first (and second) rule in fight club, very few seemed to follow it because new people showed up at fight club every day, so obviously Fight Club was being talked about. It was a huge secret, but it was also the most talked about thing in the underworld.
“This is why I loved support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention. If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window. You had their full attention. People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. And when they spoke, they weren’t telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before” (107).
I loved the way the narrator thought about his support groups and everything he is saying is true. People do treat you differently when they think you are going to die. He needed that attention and that is why he went to the support groups, because he needed that kind of honest and true connection to people (which he couldn’t get anywhere else) in order to go on living his life.
“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all a part of the same compost pile”... “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” (134).
“We are God’s middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention. Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption. Which is worse, hell or nothing?” (141).
When Tyler formed Project Mayhem, I think the point was trying to work as a unit to leave their mark on the world. To have the members of Project Mayhem prove themselves to each other and to society. The idea that they are trying to make their mark on the world and leave their name behind. Doing something worth doing and something that is going to represent them, and leave them with a special place in history. But also the idea that they need to change society and rebel in order to retrieve their individuality which society has taken away from them.
“We are not special. We are not crap or trash either. We just are” (207).
I thought this was a beautiful and powerful ending for the book. I think this was such a huge point in the book, that we are here on this earth and we are not special, but that doesn’t mean we are nothing either. I felt like this quote really got across one of the main and most important themes in the book and really summed up what the narrator and Tyler Durden were trying to say.
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