"When my mother died and left me it hurt, but I was poor and confused and used to hurting. When the love of my life, or at any rate the woman who seemed to come to be the love of my life after she was safely gone, also left me — without quite dying, because she was stuck in some awful astrophysical anomaly and far out of reach forever — that also hurt. But I was hurting all over anyway then. I wasn't used to happiness, hadn't formed the habit of it. There is a Carot's law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes, but the difference between source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable for too long to equip me for this. I was in shock."
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Science fiction authors from the United StatesNovelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesPeople from New York City
Original Language: English
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Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frederik_Pohl
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Frederik Pohl
Frederik George Pohl, Jr. (November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013) was an award-winning science fiction writer and editor, with a career spanning over seventy-five years.
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