In reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, I ran into what may be the greatest paragraph in all of the English language. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that all of human existence has been leading up to paragraph five, page 271 of this novel. It’s all downhill from here.

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”