There are various uses for time, and I have better ones than this. — Algis Budrys

It hadn’t had to take the form of this terrible bubble. It might as easily have been a sudden sharp burst behind his eyes or a slower, subtler gnawing at his vitals. But he’d known it was coming, as every man knows and tries to forget it is coming.

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?