Sooner give a cobra a kiss, than a secret to a woman. - Fritz Leiber

The greater the variety of intelligent life Don saw, the more he became sensitive to its presence.

Now as for thinking your account a tale or story, my dear Franz, to be a good story is to me the highest the highest test of the truth of anything. I make no distinction whatever between reality and fantasy, or the objective and the subjective. All life and all awareness are ultimately one, including intensest pain and death itself. Not all the play need please us, and ends are never comforting. Some things fit together harmoniously and beautifully and startlingly with thrilling discords—those are true—and some do not, and those are merely bad art.

Then he was running not so much away from the cold and its crippling, supernatural horrors, as toward civilization, which was once again a bright emblem in his brain, an answer to all small-mindedness.