I thought—To lose all this forever? And I hallucinated Aenea’s voice saying To lose all this forever is the essence of being human, my love. - Dan Simmons

Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality...and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

Mobs have passions, not brains.

Pascal's Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically...shallow.
Perhaps because it posits only two choices, said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation, she said.
Those last two aren't the same thing, I said.
No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of 'the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.'
A spiritual agoraphobic, I said.
Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her.
Religion seems to have always offered that false duality, she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.