“The truth is that men have always hated this world and tried to get off it. The earliest myth is of man gluing wings to himself and trying to fly, and he’s trying to go to the bottom of the sea, and on land he’s trying to see how much speed he can make. Because, actually, they hate life and they hate themselves and they don’t like this earth and they’d like to leave it . . . [They] spend billions of dollars putting people on the moon where they have no business to be when we have not yet learned how to keep our water pure or have a decent system of garbage disposal or snow removal on earth.”

(Katherine Anne Porter, quoted in Alice Denham’s Sleeping with Bad Boys, p. 266. Unclear whether this is a quotation from Porter’s work or a personal communication . . .)