Conan sensed their uncertainty and grinned mirthlessly and ferociously. "Who dies first?" - Robert E. Howard

I cannot believe in a paradise
Glorious, undefiled,
For gates all scrolled and streets of gold
Are tales for a dreaming child. I am too lost for shame
That it moves me unto mirth,
But I can vision a Hell of flame
For I have lived on earth.

I have come to believe that mankind eternally hovers on the brinks of secret oceans of which it knows nothing.

Never the less, it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign and alien to the people among which one's lot is cast; a profession which seems as dim and faraway and unreal as the shores of Europe.