Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. Nothing it was designed to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.

Statistics herein refer to the original editions only. Life and family
Sturgeon was a distant relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson and through his Waldo Hamilton Dicker and Dunn ancestors a direct descendant of numerous influential Puritan Presbyterian and Anglican clergymen. Their stepfather William Dickie Sturgeon (sometimes known as Argyll) was a mathematics teacher at a prep school and then Romance Languages Professor at Drexel Institute [later Drexel Institute of Technology] in Philadelphia.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Sturgeon in 2000 its fifth class of two deceased and two living writers. Theodore Sturgeon (born Edward Hamilton Waldo; February 26 1918 – May 8 1985) was an American science fiction and horror writer and critic. His most famous novel is the science fiction More Than Human (1953).