He had been cheated out of his compensation, on a technicality, by the corrupt officialdom of the spaceways. He’d turned criminal then, and had been … - Fredric Brown

Yes, it was swell to sleep when you were looking forward to something. Time flies by and you don’t even hear the rustle of its wings.

Most intelligent people of the eighties had developed a type of radio deafness which enabled them not to hear a human voice coming from a loud-speaker, although they could hear and enjoy the then infrequent intervals of music between announcements. In an age when advertising competition was so keen that there was scarcely a bare wall or an unbillboarded lot within miles of a population center, discriminating people could retain normal outlooks on life only by carefully cultivated partial blindness and partial deafness which enabled them to ignore the bulk of that concerted assault upon their senses.

“One may think,” said the professor, “of an absolute as a mode of being—”
Yeah, thought Shorty McCabe, one may think of anything as anything else, and what does it get you but a headache.