If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe (John Dies at the End, #4)

by Jason Pargin

We were just about to head to the lake to do that thing where we celebrate America’s birthday by terrifying all of its dogs,

when you’re given multiple choices with no way of knowing which one is right, you just do the easiest—that’s called ‘efficiency.’

Depression means expending all your energy to avoid having to expend energy. I wish someone would invent a pill that would give me the motivation to go pick up my Lexapro refill.

I was miserable where I was, and I would fight anyone who tried to make me leave. I realized this was madness,

taking her half of the bed out of the middle.

I stepped out onto the rusty metal stairway to find the August night air had been pre-sweated for my convenience.

He found nothing, aside from a single shoe. If the universe were a simulation, the constant appearance of random shoes along the road seemed like a good example of a glitch that never got patched out.

At the level of poverty where we exist—not starving but hopelessly locked out of the middle class—it feels like flying over an active volcano on the back of a winged creature that is friendly but also very drunk.

The toy didn’t have to be stopped. Bas had to be stopped. Stopped to death.

This society now mutates so quickly that I feel myself straining to keep up, becoming a fool in real time.

Why would killing be the one activity where we deduct for style points?

It creates a sensation of detachment from time and space by actually detaching you from time and space.

When Joy looked at humans, she saw animals so detached from the food chain that their own boredom was eating them alive. None of their instincts made sense to them; they were primates adorning themselves in skins and shiny things, all swagger and posturing with no idea what it’s for. They were grotesque and ridiculous, and she loved them so, so much. They were all doing their best, and their best was just an appalling disaster.

“Do not be afraid,” she said from behind them, knowing that human language contains few phrases more unsettling.