IOI required its egg hunters, which it referred to as "oologists," to use their employee numbers as their OASIS avatar names. These numbers were all six digits in length, and they also began with the numeral "6," so everyone began calling them the Sixers. These days, most gunters referred to them as "the Sux0rz." (Because they sucked.)

Overall, she seemed to be going for a sort of mid-'80s postapocalyptic cyberpunk girl-next-door look. And it was working for me, in a big way.

That's the first rule of online romances, pal. No one ever looks anything like their avatar.

So I'm supposed to believe you're one of those mythical guys who only cares about a woman's personality, and not about the package it comes in?

Spirituality means, among other things, taking ourselves seriously. It means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized to the menial status of producers and performers, constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees or our salaries.

Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life. Yet we are encouraged on every side to do just that.

Self-justification is a verbal defense for restoring the appearance of righteousness without doing anything about the substance.

Just as water mirrors your face, so your face mirrors your heart.

David's isn't an ideal life but an actual life.

These labels are inevitable and in many ways useful but the common element to them is that they are impersonal and partial; when they become all-encompassing, which they too frequently do, they distort our core identity. They say almost nothing, or what is even worse, the wrong thing, about who we actually are.

Keep vigilant watch over your heart; that's where life starts.

My first big disappointment is always, why don't I look like Julie Christie? Then I realise I don't look remotely like Julie Christie, and that's always a great sadness to me. Because I used to think I might have done, at one time. And I'm too fat. And I'm too old. You always see your faults, you see.