Once he’d been in his twenties, looking forward. Now he was a shade past fifty, and what he looked back on… — Algis Budrys

Amnesia was the price of immortality.

Wasn’t being a dilettante the result of an inner conviction that you were too good for routine living?

“Armies!” he burst out. “The day Freemen organize to invade another area is the day they stop being Freemen. They become soldiers, loyal to the army and their generals. They lose their identification with their homes and families. They become a separate class—an armed, organized class of military specialists no one family can stand against. And on that day, freedom dies for everybody.