Their hair belonged to some middle crinal zone between aseptic nord and latinindian jetwalled lousehouse. - Anthony Burgess

People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.

Williams’s starting point is the immense pessimism of nineteenth-century men of letters....One can explain this pessimism to some extent in terms of various social and political failures, especially in France....But Dr Williams would rather look at the physically examinable, and he finds in the author’s disease the roots of what his book cover calls, with an admirable eye on the market, the horror of life....

The important thing is to get yourself born. You’re entitled to that. But you’re not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen.