Fascinating!

A few quotes that really got me, and I'll happily share them now; so, spoilers:

And the question becomes one of utility: what we do with this all-encompassing ‘now’, this enormous, emphatic present, once we have it. Do we ‘savour’ the moment like a saint? Or ‘seize’ it like a psychopath?

When it really mattered, they were significantly more likely to step up to the plate than were their fellow (supposedly, at least) warmer, more empathic counterparts.

I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.

‘So the bottom line, strange though it may seem, is this: sadistic serial killers feel their victims’ pain in exactly the same way that you or I might feel it. They feel it cognitively, and objectively. And they feel it emotionally and subjectively too. But the difference between them and us is that they commute that pain to their own subjective pleasure.’

Particularly loved the poem that ends the book; 2 exerts:

we get bored with the routine and crave beauty and excitement fire is beautiful and we know that if we get too close it will kill us but what does that matter it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while

i do not agree with him myself i would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself