“yo who is mad dusty ya we all noe who is the person who hatrzzz there the dustyz”

“We are men who find chess fascinating. Did you expect our lives to be secretly interesting?”

“Who is this god person anyway?”

“People always thought if no one believed in God and we were nihilists then people would go around murdering each other. That didn't happen at all, we just bought a lot of things with credit.”

“And then there was that stupid social networking system, how it had just seemed like the most convenient vessel for the average narcissist. How I’d despised those who couldn’t eat a meal without prodding through their glowing portable Internet devices, searching for some tasty piece of gossip, or perhaps just something to complain about.But that social network had become an overnight epidemic—I’d watched as the daily ways in which we’d lived our lives became molded to fit this shallow instrument. It was a vast change—whether it was social evolution or de- evolution, I wasn’t quite sure; but before I knew it, by society’s standards, it was I that had become the social leper.”

“When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror at being forced to accept that they exist.”

“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.”