“Their wine was probably the best I’d ever had, and I was quickly coming to the conclusion that the creation of alcohol was probably an instinctual trait throughout all intelligent life. A silly concept, I know, but it had to be more than a coincidence that every world I’d ever been to had some form of alcoholic beverage. It was as if the first thing creatures did when they achieved a level of intelligence that no longer required them spending their entire lives scavenging for food or reproducing, was look for ways to get fucked up.”

“Ever since the first day I’d seen Drew, none of my thoughts made sense. My entire world had turned upside-down, and I had no explanation why.”

“I’d never touched alcohol—doesn’t mix too well with crazy pills—but I knew at that moment what it must feel like to be drunk. Everything in my world shifted, and I knew I would trade every breath I’d ever taken for more of him. In a heartbeat.”

“If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.”

“At these repeated signs of decadence in a society which had once been the object of his envy and his highest ambition, Webber's face had begun to take on a look of scorn...Yes, all these people looked at one another with untelling eyes. Their speech was casual, quick, and witty. But they did not say the things they knew. And they knew everything. They had seen everything. They had accepted everything. And they received every new intelligence now with a cynical and amused look in their untelling eyes. Nothing shocked them anymore. It was the way things were. It was what they had come to expect of life...He himself had not yet come to that, he did not want to come to it.”

“Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since”