“But despair and nihilism had been eating into me for years. The more I saw of the sad and futile dead, hovering at the edge of life like beggars at the door of a fancy restaurant, the grimmer and more hopeless the whole universe looked to me. If there was a God, my reasoning went, he was either a psychopath or a fuck-up-nobody you could respect would ever have created a universe where you got one chance to warm your hands at the fire, and then you spent the rest of eternity out in the cold.”