People in 1900 didn’t think that radium could hurt you, just carrying a chip of it in your pocket like a lucky rock, and then one day their legs fell… - Tim Powers

He fought to think rationally.
Guilt, he reminded himself, is an electro-chemical event in the physical brain. It’s one of the useless side-effects of consciousness, which is itself irrelevant. The ideal is the lines in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall:” “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” The important thing was that all of it moved in determinate grooves.

Processions of priests and religiosi have been for several days past praying for rain; but the gods are either angry, or nature is too powerful.

Say that again after you’ve been in the same spot and acted differently, old buddy. Maybe then I’ll be ashamed.