Opening Lines

"As we exit the comfort of the womb, impervious to any worldly influence, we forget this adamantine ideal—morality is relative. Some of us are meant to live lives that kindle in an enclosed fireplace in a desolate cabin deep within the confines of God's greenest pastures, while others are meant to live lives that burn cities, that set those greenest pastures ablaze with such a caustic fury that the cabin metamorphoses from an undisturbed sanctuary into a crude stack of firewood that keeps the embers burning in the hearts of those who execute sentience with such unadulterated élan. I am the latter, and after reading this book your cabin will be but ashes scattering across the surface of your existence. We are all just hardcover books—how long we survive is determined by how strong our spine is. Death for you will be but a puff of wind that makes the candles flicker and the flames grow tall. Death for us will be a squall that shakes the very foundations of the earth, creating tremors that cause massive fault lines to fuck each other with a vehement passion that explodes then subsides and every single candle will go out quietly because the wax has waned. And the actuality of God won't mean shit because it was within all of us. Sometimes we must sacrifice existence for the sake of avoiding extinction." - Hayden Santiago.