“We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.”

“He squints at the screen. “So, would you call yourself a… hmmm, that doesn’t sound appropriate… a ‘nasty come hungry bottom dumpster bitch’?” I wish life was more like cartoons and a piano would fall on him and his teeth would become the piano keys as stars circled his head.”

“Reality hasn't really sunk in yet, I knew that. I didn't want to know what life was going to feel like when it finally did.”

“He didn't know what he wanted. He only knew what he didn't want.”

“Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience the fall of civilization. Imagine failures of reasonableness so total that our largest bombs finally fall upon our largest cities in defense of our religious differences. What would it be like for the unlucky survivors of such a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career of human stupidity that led them over the precipice? A view from the end of the world would surely find that the six billion of us currently alive did much to pave the way to the Apocalypse.”

“I was pretty sure I knew what I looked like: a cartoon hamster in the headlights.”