“It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.”

The Narrator begins the novel with a nihilistic worldview. He believes many of his interpersonal relationships are futile because of his awareness of mortality. In fact, his deeply pessimistic perspective makes it easy for him to access his emotions.

“Chloe tells me the worst thing about her brain parasites was that no one would have sex with her.”

The novel regularly entangles sex and death, and a prime example of this entanglement is Chloe. She is not upset about her imminent death from a terminal disease; rather, she is deeply disappointed and sad because she craves physical intimacy, and no one will engage with her that way anymore.

“I don’t know how long Tyler had been working on all those nights I couldn’t sleep.”

While at first this seems like a throwaway comment related to the Narrator working a day job and Tyler working a night job, it ends up being an early instance of foreshadowing to the novel’s biggest twist: Tyler is in control when the Narrator thinks he is asleep.