Steve Toltz

I'm only sorry I was born three-quarters through this self-inflicted tragedy and not at the very beginning or at the very end. I'm fucking sick of watching this tragedy in slow motion. The other planets aren't though - they're on the edge of their suns. The reason we've never had visitors from outer space isn't that they don't exist but that they don't want to know us. We're the village idiots of all the teeming galaxies. On. quiet night you can hear their cackled laughter. And what are they laughing at? Let me put it this way: humanity is the guy who shits in his own pants and then walks around saying, 'So, do you like my new shirt?'

There's almost no situation you can get yourself into when you don't want what the other guy has.

Stupid how we think God only hears our thoughts when we address them to him in particular & not when we think our dirty little thoughts in everyday scenarios such as I hope Fred dies soon so I can have his office, it really is much nicer than mine. The meaning of faith is our understanding w/ Creator that he will not eavesdrop on our mid's whisper to itself unless invited.

What a nasty act of cruelty, giving a dying man his last wish. Don't you realize he doesn't want it? His real wish is not to die.

Pity is the awful lost dazed brother of empathy. Pity doesn't know what to do with itself so it just goes Awwwwwww.

"This is one of those sunsets made glorious by the pollution of a congested city. Someone has to say it and it might as well be me - Nature's own work pales in comparison. The same goes for mass destruction. One day we'll all be basking in the glow of a nuclear winter and God, won't it be heaven on the eyes!"

Honestly, with all the noise a father makes about demanding respect and obedience, I don't think there can be a father in the world who doesn't, at the bottom of his heart, want a simple thing: for his son to like him.

Denouncing civilization takes its toll when you continue to exist within it.

You may have all the money in the world, Mr. Hobbs, I thought, you might own the whole universe and its particles thereof, you might gain interest on the stars and reap dividends from the moon, but I'm young and you're old and I have something you don't - a future.

Does anyone go to the grave satisfied? The satisfaction can't exist as long as there's one itch left to scratch. And I don't care who you are, there's always an itch.

People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry their suffering on their faces. Also bitterness, if there's room.

In truth, his speech made an impression on my mind so deep, a surgeon could probably still make out the grooves. And not just because it planted a seed that would eventually make me distrust any feelings or ideas of my own that might be viewed as spiritual, but because there's nothing more distressing or uncomfortable to look at than a philosopher who's thought himself into a corner. And that was the night I first got a good, clear look at his corner, his terrible corner, his sad dead end, where Dad had inoculated himself against having anything mystical or religious ever happen to him, so that if God came down and boogied right in his face, he'd never allow himself to believe it. That was the night I understood he was not just a skeptic who doesn't believe in a sixth sense, but he was the über-skeptic, who wouldn't trust or believe in the other five either.