Imagine how you’d feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn’t stand.

A male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.

In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.

Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That’s the earth. Why it goes around. We’re the rocks. And what happens to us—the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse—why, that’s just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.

To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.