The 25 Most-Highlighted Passages From the John Dies at the End Novels

For better or worse, here are the bits Kindle readers found most interesting

FYI, here are the 25 most-highlighted passages from the first three books in my John Dies at the End series of novels (book 4 coming in October), as tracked on Kindle e-reader devices. If you’re already a fan of these books, you may find this interesting, if you’ve never read them, this won’t spoil the plots but will, unfortunately, accurately convey the tone:

John Dies at the End:

“Most people don’t realize it until they’re laying facedown on the pavement somewhere, gasping for their last breath. Only then do they realize that life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it’s out. Forever.” 

“Son, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.”

“That ability to see the right choice, but not until several hours have passed since making the wrong one? That’s what makes a person a dumbass, folks.”

“Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.”

“You’re the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man.”

“Guys like him, the ones who grip the Bible so tight they leave fingernail grooves, they’re the ones who are the most scared of their dark side. Always going too far the other way, fighting for the Lord, often just because it gives them an excuse to fight.”

“Every man is blessed with his gifts from the Lord. One of mine happens to be a penis large enough that, if it had a penis of its own, my penis’s penis would be larger than your penis.”

“Scientists talk about dark matter, the invisible, mysterious substance that occupies the space between stars. Dark matter makes up 99.99 percent of the universe, and they don’t know what it is. Well I know. It’s apathy. That’s the truth of it; pile together everything we know and care about in the universe and it will still be nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of a vast black ocean of Who Gives A Fuck.”

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This Book is Full of Spiders:

“He buckled his seat belt, which he always did because he never knew when he would need to ramp something. He made the engine growl and told the headlights to fuck the night.” 

“War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.”

“Falling in love with a house or a car or a pair of shoes, it was a dead end. You save your love for the things that can love you back.”

“The English language needs a word for that feeling you get when you badly need help, but there is no one who you can call because you’re not popular enough to have friends, not rich enough to have employees, and not powerful enough to have lackeys. It’s a very distinct cocktail of impotence, loneliness and a sudden stark assessment of your non-worth to society.”

“I don’t know how they catch the birds. I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can’t fly because if it could, it would have a different name entirely. We would call it ‘sir’ because it would be the dominant species on the planet. None of us would leave the house unless a Goliath Fucking Flying Bird-Eating Spider said it was okay.”

“John’s old Caddie had a huge engine that would qualify as a human rights violation if built today. It roared down the road, chugging gas and farting a blue cloud of dinosaur souls.”

“That is why we fear the zombie. The zombie looks like a man, walks like a man, eats and otherwise functions fully, yet is devoid of the spark. It represents the nagging doubt that lays deep in the heart of even the most zealous believer: behind all of your pretty songs and stained glass, this is what you really are. Shambling meat. Our true fear of the zombie was never that its bite would turn us into one of them. Our fear is that we are already zombies.”

“If God was the type who needed to be asked verbally before he would support your side over man-eating monsters, then she wasn’t sure what good he would be once he joined.”

“There are two kinds of people in the world; the first see locks and warning signs and say, ‘If they’re keeping it locked up so tight, that means it’s both dangerous and none of my business.’ But the second type say, ‘If they want to keep it a secret so bad, then it must be worth seeing.’”

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What the Hell Did I Just Read?:

“The reality is that society had gotten too fast, noisy, and stressful for the human brain to process and everybody was ingesting something to either keep up or dull the shame of falling behind. For those few who truly live clean, well, it’s the self-righteousness that gets them high.”

“They didn’t have witch hunts because they believed in witches. They believed in witches so they could have witch hunts.”

“You want sympathy, you can find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.”

“No matter who you are or where you’re from, we can all look upon the raw, energetic creations of children and agree that they are very shitty artists.”

“Past experience has only taught us not to rely on past experience.”

“Society is nothing more than people cooperating with other people they’d much rather murder.”

“We will live and die according to how we interpret the unfamiliar. All of human culture is nothing more than that very process, playing out again and again.”

“If you understand how this sort of thing could work, please write down your explanation with as much clarity and detail as you can, then throw it in the trash because who gives a shit.”

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Bonus: The opening line from If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe:

“This is really about my wife,” said the man with the parasite gnawing on his skull. “I’ll let her explain.”

The fourth novel in this series, titled If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe is up for pre-order now:

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