Jay Lake Quotes

There is no devil mocking you. God didn’t give you cancer to punish you. Colon cancer has come to you through a combination of losing the genetic lottery, cosmic rays, and perhaps too much bacon in your younger days.

Horn could hear the click of the dice that made up the multiverse. Beneath the struggles of gods and men and monsters, behind the powers of magic and prayer and bared blade, chance governed all.

But if you really want to feel the stress of divine regard, spend time in an oncology unit. The half-hidden whispers and the strained smiles and the whirring click of the infusion pumps form a choir of pain every bit as agonized as the howls of the damned in some imagined hell.

Some things change a man slowly. Journeys. The passage of years. The love of a good woman. Imprisonment. The monk paused a moment. Horn sensed he was speaking from experience, looking back at his own paths. Then: Some things change a man swiftly. War. Disease. Shipwrecks. The love of a bad woman.

People say there are no atheists in the foxholes, but people are idiots. It’s awfully tough to believe in God when you’re knee deep in mud, blood, and other men’s guts. Combat is the Problem of Evil on the hoof.

Why was he thinking of her now? Fool, fool, fool. The barmaid had cast the oldest spell of all on him, a cantrip requiring only alcohol, sorrow, and time.

Nothing ever built could truly match the pattern-recognition and free associative skills of human (or post-human) wetware collectively known as “hunches.” Strong AIs could approximate that uniquely biological skill through a combination of brute force and deeply clever circuit design, but even then, the spark of inspiration did not flow so well.

The problem with basing your entire economy and raison d’être on a constrained resource was that eventually you ran out of the resource in question. Decisions which had seemed canny two centuries ago during the bright days of the port’s founding and initial construction were now foolhardy in the blindingly obvious light of hindsight.

Magic, the blessed curse that gnaws at the soul and leaves a void in the mind into which too much that is alien and deadly can settle.

He’d volunteered for the Howard Institute program because of the most basic human motivation—tourism. Seeing what was over the next hill had trumped even sex as the driving force in human evolution.

Unwise or unlucky wizards learned fast enough how much one paid for one’s mistakes. One sometimes paid more dearly for one’s successes.

I know he is important Meat because he is dressed like a fool and doing no work.

All men are born to die…Once a fool pretends otherwise.

Sarita placed little faith in such rumors. The fears of small people everywhere could speak louder than any voice, and with less reason. Legends were just that: legendary.

All revelation is a lie. It must be. The divine is an incommunicable disease, too large and splintered to fit within the confines of a primate brain. Our minds evolved to compete for fruit and pick carrion, not to comb through the parasites that drop from the clouds of God’s dreaming.
But just as an equation asymptotically approaches the solution, so revelation can asymptomatically approach the truth about the underlying nature of the universe. The lie narrows to the width of the whisker of a quantum cat, while the truth, poking slowly along behind, finally merges Siamese-twinned to its precursor.