What am I giving you? I am giving you nothing. I am giving you things that God knows, everyone knows... It seems like you know something, but you still know nothing. I tell you and it evaporates. I don't care - how could I care? I tell you how many people I have slept with (thirty-two), or how my parents left this world, and what have I really given you? Nothing. I can tell you the names of my friends, their phone numbers, but what do you have? You have nothing. They all granted permission. Why is that? Because you have nothing, you have some phone numbers. It seems precious for one, two seconds. You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me. I give you virtually everything I have. I give you all of the best things I have, and while these things are things that I like, memories that I treasure, good or bad, like the pictures of my family on my walls I can show them to you without diminishing them. I can afford to give you everything. We gasp at the wretches on afternoon shows who reveal their hideous secrets in front of millions of similarly wretched viewers, and yet... what have we taken from them, what have they given us? Nothing. We know that Janine had sex with her daughter's boyfriend, but... then what? We will die and we will have protected... what? Protected from all the world that, what, we do this or that, that our arms have made these movements and our mouths these sounds? Please.
- Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius