I am not a fate worse than death, dammit! - Lois McMaster Bujold

But pain...seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?

So much of the uncanny—or the holy, for that matter—is inward experience. As such, testimony about it tends to be tainted. People lie. People delude themselves, or others. People are swayed or frightened or convinced they have seen things they have not. People are, frankly, sometimes simply mad.

You’re worse than evil. You’re inefficient.