Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an erro… - Philip K. Dick

“Isn’t there any way—” He broke off. Can’t the past be altered? he asked himself. Evidently not. Cause and effect work in only one direction, and change is real. So what’s gone is gone, and I might as well get out of here.

Doctor Labyrinth, like most people who read a great deal and who have too much time on their hands, had become convinced that our civilization was going the way of Rome. He saw, I think, the same cracks forming that had sundered the ancient world, the world of Greece and Rome; and it was his conviction that presently our world, our society, would pass away as theirs did, and a period of darkness would follow.

He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.