We denizens of Earth have a common vice: We take what we’re offered, whether we need it or not. You can get into a lot of trouble that way. - Robert Sheckley

Outside the curtained windows, Paris stewed in its miasma of self-congratulation and diesel fumes.

After many centuries we have rediscovered nature’s way of keeping populations in hand. Nature does it the old-fashioned way, by killing people.

For Polletti, experience had brought only the bitter residue of pleasure which is the true essence of disenchantment. Certain delights which in his youth had seemed unique and unobtainable had turned out, upon acquisition, to be infinitely and drearily repeatable.