“That you will become way less concerned with that other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”

—Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

“A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell's own price in the end, but what if you should gain your object? What if you should, heartless, actually storm the Dark Tower and win it? If there is naught but darkness in the beast to monster? To gain one's object as a beast would only be bitterly comic, like giving a magnifying glass to an elephaunt. But to gain one's object as a monster...”

—The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King