I’ve learned that having a lot of money is more fun than not having a lot of money, and that once you’ve got… — Tim Powers

Say that again after you’ve been in the same spot and acted differently, old buddy. Maybe then I’ll be ashamed.

Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans’ error.

When they’d gone the old man turned around to watch the sun’s slow descent. The Boat of Millions of Years, he thought; the boat of the dying sungod Ra, tacking down the western sky to the source of the dark river that runs through the underworld from west to east, through the twelve hours of the night, at the far eastern end of which the boat will tomorrow reappear, bearing a once again youthful, newly reignited sun.

Or, he thought bitterly, removed from us by a distance the universe shouldn’t even be able to encompass, it’s a vast motionless globe of burning gas, around which this little ball of a planet rolls like a pellet of dung propelled by a kephera beetle. Take your pick, he told himself as he started slowly down the hill...But be willing to die for your choice.