“Are you still afraid?” I asked her. “No,” she said, “I am thankful. The world has been threatened too long by the extraordinary, the supernatural an… - Michael Moorcock

Your yearning, Pepin Hunchback, is not for the past as it was," she was saying softly. "It is for a world that never existed—a Paradise, a Golden Age. Men have always spoken of such a time in history—but such an idyllic world is a yearning for childhood, not the past, for lost innocence. It is childhood we wish to return to.

It is the spirit of Salem—the corrupting influence of Puritanism which in itself is perversion of the Stoic ideal—infecting what remains of a nation which could have set an example to the world.

Only Bowgentle, the philosopher-poet, his old friend, had an inkling of what he meant and even then Bowgentle believed that it reflected not on the nature of the landscape but on the particular nature of Count Brass’s mind.
“You’re exhausted, disorientated,” Bowgentle would say. “The ordering mechanism of the brain is working too hard, so you see a pattern to existence that, in fact, only stems from your own weariness and disturbance...”