“Take some exercise, try to recover the look of a human being.”

“I may never recover. It was like an out-of-body experience. I’m an alien trying on human rituals.”

“Everyone goes through a period of Traviamento - when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long.”

“The terror ran endlessly on in his mind, making him feel like a rat trapped on an exercise wheel. And when he tried to look ahead to some better, brighter time, he could see only darkness.”

“Reducing human beings to the faint after-image of some omnipotent deity, or trying to give human life meaning by postponing real fulfilment to some post-mortem paradise ... can actually threaten to rob real life of its meaningfulness.”

“Human beings -- human children especially -- seldom deny themselves the pleasure of exercising a power which they are conscious of possessing, even though that power consist only in a capacity to make others wretched”