“I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.”

“Sordid things, for the most part, are what make human beings, my father included, move. That's what it is to be human, I'm afraid.”

“Do the thing that's less passive. Do the active thing. There's more of the human in that.”

“Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside.”

“I'm human. The single most overused excuse on the planet for doing the absolute wrong thing.”

“They were sitting in their nice apartments or dorm rooms reading the latest Haruki Murakami story while I was sitting in a shitty little ramshackle house reading a used copy of Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre. They weren't bad people. They all did volunteer work, voted Democrat and believed in the goodness of humanity. I voted Democrat, needed Habitat for Humanity to come to my house and knew from personal experience the shittiness of humanity because I was shitty myself.”