Unaware of history's higher significance, I slumbered through the bliss of infancy, feeling no impulse… — Russell Baker

At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

​So far as I could make out, what writers did couldn't even be classified as work.

He looked upon the time that had been my future in a disturbing way. My future was his past, and being young, he was indifferent to the past.