You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have … - Anthony Burgess

Williams’s starting point is the immense pessimism of nineteenth-century men of letters....One can explain this pessimism to some extent in terms of various social and political failures, especially in France....But Dr Williams would rather look at the physically examinable, and he finds in the author’s disease the roots of what his book cover calls, with an admirable eye on the market, the horror of life....

The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cured.

My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world...