“Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, “Woo the muse of the odd.” You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.”

“You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.”

“All these guys picking on smart kids and calling them geeks and dweebs are going to grow up and want to know why they don't do something about the terrible state the world is in. I can tell you why. By the time they grow up, most of the kids who realy could have changed things are wrecked. ”

“We have this weird thing in the world where you don't get insulted for what you do, you get insulted for who you are.”

“«“I meant, tell me all about this steampunk thing!” Gavin broke in. “How does that concept work out for you people, here in Brazil?”“You don’t know about steampunk?” shouted Xavier, dubiously.“Well, I don’t read many novels! Because I’m kinda fully-booked already! But, obviously, you’re a science fiction writer at a Futurist conference! And I can see that you’re all dressed up like some fancy guy from the past, from the 19th century! So what gives with that? What is all that about?”»”

“«All the Amazon guys around Seattle were also aware of the trend. They all knew that, someday, European haute couture would sell online. The problem was that feat couldn’t be done by anybody from Amazon. Because Amazon guys were hacker geeks and cheesy hicks. Amazon had been invented to sell sci-fi books. The least chic thing in the world.The European couture biz would never go anywhere near a dorky sci-fi geek like Jeff Bezos. As for Jeff himself, Jeff would much rather conquer outer space with his private rocket than ever dress the First Lady of France.»”

“After all, we're currently living in a Bizarro society where teenagers are technology-obsessed, where the biggest sellers in every bookstores are fantasy novels about a boy wizard, and the blockbuster hit movies are all full of hobbits and elves or 1960s spandex superheroes. You don't have to go to a Star Trek convention to find geeks anymore. Today, almost everyone is an obsessive, well-informed aficionado of something. Pick your cult: there are food geeks and fashion geeks and Desperate Housewives geeks and David Mamet geeks and fantasy sports geeks. The list is endless. And since everyone today is some kind of trivia geek or other, there's not even a stigma anymore. Trivia is mainstream. "Nerd" is the new "cool.”