Michael Moorcock Quotes

You are martyred, as woman is ever martyred, particularly if she seeks her own power.

All Empires fall,
All ages die,
All strife shall be in vain.
All Kings go down,
All hope must fail,
But Tanelorn remains—
Our Tanelorn remains...

“Are you still afraid?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, “I am thankful. The world has been threatened too long by the extraordinary, the supernatural and the monstrous. I shall be happy enough to smell the pines and hear the song of the thrush. And to be with you, Captain von Bek.”
“The world is still threatened,” I said to her, “but perhaps not by Lucifer. I held her hand tightly.

The soldier shook his head, waxing philosophical. “It’s a madness, sir. We’ve all got it. It could go on until the last human being crawls away from the body of the chap he’s just bashed to bits with a stone. That’s what war is, sir—madness. You don’t think about what you’re doing. You forget, don’t you—you just go on killing and killing.”

There are subjects forbidden by good manners, it seems. As in many societies, I suppose, where the very fundamentals of their existence are the subject of the deepest taboos. What is this terror of reality, I wonder, which plagues the human spirit?

What more could you need?"
I smiled in self-mockery. "Reassurance, I suppose."
"That must come from your own judgment, from your own testing of your conscience. It is the only kind of reassurance worth having, as I'm sure you would agree.

Are the gods mad or are they so subtle we cannot fathom the workings of their minds?

Your yearning, Pepin Hunchback, is not for the past as it was," she was saying softly. "It is for a world that never existed—a Paradise, a Golden Age. Men have always spoken of such a time in history—but such an idyllic world is a yearning for childhood, not the past, for lost innocence. It is childhood we wish to return to.

Scholarly men were suspect in my town. Women could not admit to scholarship at all. Men are afraid of two things in this world, it seems—women and knowledge. Both threaten their power, eh?

Elric was recollecting what was best and noblest in his own people and in himself, and even as he celebrated this he mourned the self-obsessed creatures they had become, using their power merely to preserve their power and that, he supposed, was true decay...

Why ascribe meaning to all this? The further away from the fundamentals of life we go, the more we quest for their meaning. There is no meaning. It is here. It has always been here in some state. It will always be here. That is all we can ever truly know. It is all we should want to know.

There were three known existing sapphires. One was in the Conquest of Space Museum on Terra, one was in the hands of United System President Polonius Delph—he was the richest man in seven worlds, or had been until he’d paid cash for his jewel. The other had been stolen soon after its discovery. Maybe Delph had it...
“From what I understand of your world, Delph isn’t the only one who wants the sapphires. He has rivals in the Plutocracy. Another mysterious collector? Or those rivals are competing for the presidency or they think they can ruin him. As you know, it’s a vicious circle in politics. You can’t get to be president unless you have the wealth and you can’t really make massive sums until you’re president.”

Here, I thought, I had found the human race in its final stages of decadence—perverse, insouciant, without ambition. And I could not blame them. After all, they had no future.

She opened her bag and made sure of her jar of instant coffee. It was the one thing she couldn’t get at the End of Time.

Regret is useless since it can achieve nothing.