Everything's incredible, if you can skin off the crust of obviousness our habits put on it. Every object and event contains within itself an infinity… - Aldous Huxley

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce...As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

Shearwater sighed, like a whale in the night.