“...Logically, I know I'm being controlled by my emotions. But my logic is just 2 percent right now. I feel emotionally raw." [Mystery] clenched his bedsheet in his fist. "I feel strange and empty, like after a shit.”

“You know what else I did?' he yelled after me as I left. "I fingered her!"I turned back to look at him. He made me laugh. He pretended to be so confused and helpless, but maybe he was smarter than all of us.'The inside of a vagina isn't at all what I thought it would feel like,' he shouted excitedly. 'It feels very organized.'Maybe not.”

“That's when I started to leave it behind. I realized that I got my entire validation from women. Women became like gods to me, but false gods.”

“I feel like I'm in a world with its own sense of logic.”

“I was becoming too dependent on female attention, allowing it to be my sole reason for leaving the house besides food. In the process of dehumanizing the opposite sex, I had also been dehumanizing myself.”

“Well," he said, opening the door to his car, "all you can do is put on an appearance of confidence sometimes. And after a while, others will start to believe it." [Eric Weber] grabbed the door handle to pull it closed. "And then you die.”

“For all the self-improvement books I had read, I still wasn't above shallow validation-seeking. None of us were. That's why we were in the game. Sex wasn't about getting our rocks off; it was about being accepted.”