This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It (John Dies at the End, #2)

by David Wong

The thing about not having parents is you don’t have anyone to tell you you’re heading down a path paved with grossly inaccurate expectations of what the world owes you.

There was a pair of couples that looked college age—all four of them drunk off their asses, celebrating the fact that they would be young and pretty forever and ever.

These guys would go out in the woods and train and shoot and defend to the death their right to stay in childhood until age thirty-five.

“Your ‘let’s remain calm and stay put’ speech would be a lot more convincing if you weren’t giving it in front of a pile of burning skeletons.

war is never about killing the enemy. War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.”

In ancient times everybody on earth spoke the same language, then they decided to build a tower that would reach all the way up to heaven. Then God cursed everybody on the job site to each speak a different language to mess them up.”

“Man, I hope you’re not about to tell me that all of this shit is a curse from God because we built our buildings too tall. Kind of a flat town to impose that lesson on. You’d think he’d take it to Dubai.”

Dunbar’s number. Named after a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar. He studied primate brains, and their behavior in groups. And he found something that will change the way you think about the world. He found that the larger the primate’s neocortex, the larger the communities it formed. It takes a lot of brain to process all of the relationships in a complex society, you see. When primates find themselves in groups larger than what their brains can handle, the system breaks down. Factions form. Wars break out.

Based on the size of a human’s neocortex, that number is about a hundred and fifty. That’s how many other humans we can recognize before we max out our connections. With some variability among individuals, of course. That is our maximum capacity for sympathy.”

“Search one of these crates. See if you can find some fucking antidepressants.” “All right, all right—” “Seriously, it’s an emergency. I’ll cram them down the barrel of the gun and blow them right into your brain.”

They had me down in the basement for a while.” “They did? You didn’t tell me that. What’s down there? Surely nothing worth complaining about, or else you would have brought it up by now.”

John made the engine of the monster truck rumble to life, and a hundred miles away a seismologist saw the needle on his machine twitch. Amy mumbled, “I cannot imagine the penis of the guy who designed this thing.”

the anxiety of juggling too many personal connections is so crushing that we literally fantasize about seven billion people dying horribly just so they’ll stop pestering us.

try playing lots of 1980s era power ballads, they hate that. I think because it’s the closest earthly approximation of the music they play in Heaven.