Quotes from Joshua Davis

In Phoenix, they were called illegal aliens and pegged as criminals. They were alternately viewed as American, Mexican, or neither. Now, for a moment, they were simply teenagers at a robotics competition by the ocean.

He ended up shuttered in his house, with no friends, doing drugs alone for days on end and wondering whether he should kill himself just as his father had. "My life was total hell," he says. Finally he went to a therapist, who suggested he go to Alcoholics Anonymous. He attended a meeting and started sobbing. Someone gave him a hug and told him he wasn't alone. "That's when life really began for me," he says. He says he's been sober ever since.

Emshwiller stepped out of the pickup wielding a matte-black rifle with a large scope (it was actually an airgun that fired 6.26-mm slugs). She was wearing her most elegant blue dress and a backward baseball cap. "I wanted to look freaky," she says.

Part of him believes he's still on that trip, that everything since has been one giant hallucination, and that one day he'll snap out of it and find himself back on his couch in St. Louis, listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

His success was due in part to his ability to spread his own paranoia, the fear that there was always somebody about to attack.

John has always been searching for something," says Jennifer Irwin, McAfee's girlfriend at the time. She remembers him telling her once that he was trying to reach "the expansive horizon.

I gravitate to the world's outcasts," he explained in another email. "Prostitutes, thieves, the handicapped, the enormously ugly or deformed … For some reason I have always been fascinated by these subcultures.

were nothing but junk; nobody would want them.

Fredi realized that something extraordinary was about to occur. He leaned across the table and grabbed Lorenzo's shirt. "Lorenzo, if what I think is about to happen does happen, I do not, under any circumstances, want to hear you say the word Hooters onstage.

It is only when we are blinded by a narrow conceptual view of the world that life can seem meaningless.