I remember an aunt saying sagely, “The good die young.” Not exactly a motivation to behave yourself.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

History was indeed controlled by blind forces, as well as character and courage and treachery and love. And accident and random chance. And stray bullets and telegrams and tips. And cats.

It’s that undefined something we’re really afraid of-the flicker of movement we don’t quite catch out of the corner of our eye, the bad dream we can’t quite remember when we wake up, the sound of a door opening downstairs we thought we heard. And worst of all, the things we’re not sure even happened, the things that we might just have imagined, that might mean we’re going mad, all those nameless, nebulous things we can’t quite put our finger on and can only guess at.

There are moments when rather than reforming the human race I’d like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O’Reilly’s macaques, which have to have more sense.

They were a susitute. They were what you did when you couldn’t have what you wanted.

Time is the fire in which we burn. – Delmore Schwartz.

We weren’t even a halfway decent detectin’ team. We hadn’t solved the case. The case had been solved in spite of us. Worse, we had been such an impediment, we’d had to be packed off out of the way before the course of history could correct itself. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but an elopement.

It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century contemps complained about muddy roads and highwaymen. No doubt Professor Peddick’s Greeks complained about recalcitrant horses and chariot wheels falling off.

Nothing in all those “O swan” poems had ever mentioned that they hissed. Or resented being mistaken for felines. Or bit.