Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards. - Fritz Leiber

And I, well, in the month I’ve been here I’ve learned that the only way to survive in civilization is to abide by its unwritten rules—far more important than its laws chiseled in stone—and break them only at peril, in deepest secrecy, and taking all precautions.

To understand why George fell for this story, one must remember his stifled romanticism, his sense of personal failure, his deep need to believe. The thing came to him like, or rather instead of, a religious conversion.

What was the whole literature of supernatural horror but an essay to make death itself exciting?—wonder and strangeness to life’s very end.