Emericus Durden Quotes

“I grew excited when I realized this basic asymmetry implied that nothing – no evidence, no information, no facts or data – connected me to the stranger except for the evidence of my own personal observations which remained private as long as I kept them that way. And what did that mean? First of all, it meant I could influence the stranger’s life in any way I wanted without him or anyone else suspecting my involvement. But what did that mean? Among other things, it meant I could disrupt this man’s life in some rather extreme ways and never become a suspect in a subsequent investigation. Or did it mean that? I wasn’t sure but I felt I needed to find out.”

“We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.”

“As she fell, Esther wasn’t worried about being blown off course and plummeting into the rocks below. She wasn’t worried about hitting the shallows and pin diving to the ocean floor and shattering her spine. She wasn’t even worried about Cthulhu. (Okay, maybe a little.) What she worried about was Eugene’s willingness to jump. The way he glanced down at the water far below and looked at it like it was home. The way he stepped lightly from the cliff’s edge, and the way he fell through the air faster than she did, dragged down by earth’s magnetic field. The way he flickered in the sunlight as he hit the water, the same way Tyler Durden flashed on-screen four times before you saw him solidly. Foreshadowing the twist to come. Eugene was afraid of demons, and monsters, and above all the dark, but he was not afraid of death. That scared her more than anything.”

“No claims were made by him [Buddha] to any unalterable truth, nor did he demand that his teachings should simply be accepted, taken on trust or acquired through an act of faith. Instead he [Buddha] encouraged those who wished to make the spiritual journey he himself had undertaken to experiment for themselves as individuals, retaining what was useful to them and abandoning what was not.”

“I don't want to die without any scars.”

“If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?”

“This is your life, and its ending one minute at a time.”

“Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I'm wondering how clean this gun is.”

“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. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”