It was easy to see how one could think of the family as a single terrible creature stretching back through time, some genetic flaw or chemical magic … - Lucius Shepard

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.

And that in itself was a sufficient reason to hit him, purely for educational purposes: I had, you see, reached the level of drunkenness at which an amoral man such as myself understands his whimsies to be moral imperatives.

You must think us fools," he said, leading me back into the gathering, "to waste ourselves in commemorating an era which never really existed.