That the official and the criminal are inextricably aligned should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the workings of their government, but … - Lucius Shepard

She’s sad because she’s drinking to be sad because she’s afraid that what she does not feel is actually a feeling. Typical post-modern Manhattan bullshit.

Travel has always served to inspire me, as it has many writers, as it apparently did my alter ego; yet the farther we proceeded down the Mekong, the more I came to realize that there was a blighted sameness to the world and its various cultures. Strip away their trappings and you found that every tribe was moved by the same passions, and this was true not only in the present but also, I suspected, in ages past. Erase from your mind the images of the kings and exotic courtesans and maniacal monks that people the legends of Southeast Asia, and look to a patch of ground away from the temples and palaces of Angkor Wat—there you will find the average planetary citizen, a child eating the Khmer equivalent of a Happy Meal and longing for the invention of television.

The outcry surrounding the public disclosure of the project had taken only three months to die, this—thought Jocundra—a telling commentary upon the spongelike capacity of the American consciousness to absorb miracles, digest them along with the ordinary whey provided by the media, and reduce them to half-remembered trivia.