Yours is not to reason why, eh? I guess you’re lucky at that. It’s not dying that hurts—it’s living. - Keith Laumer

I know; you don’t consider it impossible. That’s the trouble with you; you don’t consider anything impossible. It would make life a lot easier for me if you’d let me rule out a few items—like leprechauns who hang out at Stonehenge.

“Why do you fight this war?”
The alien mind howled out its war slogan—as incomprehensible as an astrologer’s jargon.

The last burst picked me up and threw me a thousand miles into an open grave and the mud showered down on me and a giant tombstone fell out of the sky to mark the place, but I didn’t care any more, because I was far away, in that place where the heroes and the cowards lie together with a fine impartiality, waiting for eternity to pass, slowly, like a procession of snails creeping across an endless desert toward a distant line of mountains. (p. 18)