You may as well go, Maurice. You can’t undo what you’ve done in any case, nor can I expect to talk to you out of whatever it is you’re planning. But … - James Blish

“Though the wicked may hide, the claws of crabs are dangerous people in bridges,” Father Selahny intoned abruptly. As was the case with all his utterances, the group would doubtless find out what this one meant only after sorting out its mixed mythologies and folklores, and long after it was too late to do anything about it.

All but a small percentage of Americans live out of their lives without ever coming closer to murder than the daily tabloid can bring them, though magazine fiction and video confer spurious intimacy with the subject.

High intelligence did not imply superior ability to come to terms with one’s social environment; indeed, there seemed to be some sort of rough correlation between high intelligence and the accumulation of aberrations.